Case Study
Since we've been using TheirStory, it's just removed that barrier so that we could overcome the other hurdles and barriers that happen in the library, which is staff bandwidth and resources.Ani Boyadjian, Los Angeles Public Library
01
Problem
Decades of stalled oral history attempts, undone by recording gear, tape rewinding, and hand transcription staff didn't have time for.
02
Goal
A lasting, institution-wide program covering community, staff, and donor stories, plus stewarding other organizations' collections.
03
Solution
Three interview tracks, in-library podcast rooms or remote Zoom, MOUs with partner orgs, and ~20 peer-recruited interviewers.
04
How TheirStory helped
Remote or in-person recording, 95%+ accurate auto-transcription, AI indexing, and dedicated project folders for partners.
Los Angeles Public Library has been collecting oral histories, on and off, since 1991. That year, photo manager Carolyn Cole noticed the library's image collection didn't reflect the full range of communities in Los Angeles, and started community collecting alongside a small set of interviews, about a dozen in all, that became the Shades of LA collection.
"You had to press rewind, and then you'd have to do all of the transcription work," says Ani Boyadjian, research and special collections manager at Central Library. The turn came from an unrelated project: a pandemic-era COVID-19 Community Archive that got written about, which is how TheirStory's team found LAPL in the first place.
Boyadjian organized the program around three areas: community stories, institutional stories from longtime staff, and archival stories from donors. Many interviews happen in the library's own podcast rooms. Automatic transcription, better than 95 percent accurate, has let more staff run interviews themselves.
The program grew slowly, then not slowly. Roughly 20 librarians across the system now conduct interviews, most recruited by a colleague who'd already done one.