Freie Universität Berlin

Since 2006, the Digital Interview Collections team has been compiling oral history archives, thereby supporting research and teaching at the university. The team's expertise covers the entire process from conducting and recording interviews to collection management, automatically supported transcription, and scientific indexing, as well as the legally compliant and ethically reflective provision and didactic preparation of oral history interviews.

Topics include Nazi forced labor and the German occupation of Greece, as well as the history of the Freie Universität Berlin, the Iron Curtain, the Church Asylum movement, and the German sect “Colonia Dignidad” in Chile. It also provides access to important collections of interviews on National Socialism and the Holocaust, such as the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.

The Oral-History.Digital interview portal, developed and maintained by the University Library, is an indexing and research platform for the audiovisual research data of numerous museums, universities, and foundations. It currently lists 42 archives with 4,098 interviews.

The team is involved in the development of the National Research Data Infrastructure in the Text+ and 4Memory consortia. In the ASR4Memory project, an AI-based service for automated transcription with automatic speech recognition was developed. The Text+ohd project is developing interfaces for metadata and TEI transcripts. The Open.Oral-History project is developing recommendations and tools for risk assessment, anonymization, and the provision of legally protected and ethically sensitive audiovisual interviews.

For historical and political education, various multimedia learning applications with eyewitness interviews have been developed for use in schools and memorial sites.

In addition to these digital platforms, publications, lectures, and seminars also communicate the results of the various cooperation and third-party funded projects.