One Community, Many Stories

 

    Submitted by: Joan Dudzinski

Last fall we posted a blog about being awarded a Community Webs grant.

                "The library has been awarded a Community Webs Grant from the Internet Archive’s Community History Web Archiving Program to focus on documenting the experiences of members of the local Indian American community in moving to Forsyth County. " 

 

Now, it is time to roll out our latest oral history project entitled One Community, Many Stories.

 

As we came up with our game plan for the program, the decision was made to not exclude anyone who might want to participate. However, we are still focusing on the Indian American community and what brought them to Forsyth County. A point person has been assigned at each branch as we expect to find patrons from all branches interested in participating in the program. As the county has grown so quickly, we hope to interview patrons from all corners of the county who came from different places or whose ancestors may have come from different places. We already have a couple members of the community, Alfred John, Chairman of the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners, and Rupal Vaishnav, local attorney, signed up for an interview.

​The project will officially begin on April 18th. The library will be promoting the project through the end of May but we can continue scheduling interviews past May. Patrons will be able to sign up to participate on the website where a form will be provided to enter their contact information. Patrons can also call a branch to have their information entered as needed. Each branch will schedule interviews of their respective patrons. One aspect that is different from our previous Forsyth Remembers projects is that patrons can provide documents or photos that they wish to be part of their submission. The documents will be scanned in and uploaded to ArchiveIt which is the archival storage site provided to us from the grant. Also, we always welcome patrons to share their stories from our previous projects (Lunar Landing and Lake Lanier Memories) to add to the collection. All of our oral history projects fall under the Forsyth Remembers program umbrella.

We are excited for the rollout of this project and are providing talking points for staff. Please review these and be ready to talk up this amazing community program!