UW-Madison Campus Voices

Jump to: Technical Note

About the Collection

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Oral History Project was established as part of the University History Project in 1971. Its initial charge was to interview prominent emeritus faculty members about their research and careers at the University. Over the years, the Project became a part of the UW-Madison Archives, changed from a project to a program, and expanded its scope to include interviews with campus administrators, staff, and students as well as faculty. Taken individually, these interviews reflect the careers and interests of the interviewees; taken collectively they constitute a narrative of the development of the University over time. As such, they form an invaluable part of the historical record of the University in its over 160 years of existence. The Oral History Program's collection--held at the UW-Madison Archives--currently encompasses over 1,000 interviews (nearly 3,500 hours) touching on all aspects of the University's history.

Oral history interviews are protected by the 1978 copyright law. Both interviewer and narrator must sign a release before the interview may be used by anyone. Legal releases obtained by interviewers for this collection stipulate that the information in the interviews may be used for scholarly and educational purposes, but extensive segments of the interviews may not be published or used in a public presentation without the written permission of the UW-Madison Oral History Program. When quoting from an interview, the following bibliographic form is recommended: Miller, Elizabeth and James. Interviewed by Laura Smail. Tape recording, 1985. University Archives and Records Management Services, Madison, Wisconsin.

Technical Note

Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):

• Hand-written texts;
• Texts that contain diacritics;
• Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
• Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
• Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.