Racconti di vita da una terra di confine. Valorizzazione dell’Archivio orale della Biblioteca Provinciale Italiana “Claudia Augusta” di Bolzano: le videointerviste del progetto Verba manent (2003-2007)

This thesis proposes a series of methodological suggestions covering all stages of oral history research – from the production to the dissemination of the interviews. It starts from the video interviews collected between 2003 and 2007 by the South Tyrolean historian Giorgio Delle Donne, which constitute the basis of the Oral History Archive of the Italian Provincial Library ‘Claudia Augusta’ (Bolzano). Using both oral history and archival methodology, the thesis retraces the life and the work of the historian, explaining the reasons behind the collection of the interviews, as well as the history of the library that preserves these oral sources. Furthermore, a wide-ranging reflection on the transcription of interviews illustrates how the scholarly debate has involved three major 'oral schools' (British, Italian, and American) for decades. This introduction is followed by several tests of automatic speech transcription conducted on the interviews collected by Delle Donne, which show how technology can support transcription work – which, however, always requires human work in the end. The status quaestionis of the decade-long debate on archiving oral source involving researchers, archivists, and librarians reveals the difficulty in identifying common standards for interview description. The author proposes thus some practical suggestions on how to preserve the interview and how to better integrate these sources into the library catalogue. The thesis concludes with new ideas for the development of the oral history collection kept in the ‘Claudia Augusta’ library. Despite being based on a specific case, the suggested practical advice can be used by other institutions that preserve oral sources, and also by individual researchers interested in oral history. Full accessibility, guaranteed only by a good preservation of the interviews, is a fundamental tool to promote the personal stories of the interviewees. The importance of preservation unites oral history and archival management. Oral history is a conversation about the past that happens in the present and is future-oriented; similarly, archiving means choosing, interpreting, and keeping traces that would otherwise be erased. The archive is not about the past, it is about the future.