Warren Wilson College is pleased to announce the receipt of a highly competitive grant from the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).

This grant will allow us to digitize, transcribe, and make accessible through the College’s institutional repository a subset of its collection of 101 oral histories, conducted over a time period of about 20 years, from the late 1970s and early 1980s to the early 2000s. This preservation project will focus on the 37 oral histories recorded on tapes most at risk of deterioration and that lack transcription; these recordings are also of great importance to the College’s historical record, and we are keen to preserve these stories for future generations. The funding allows us to partner with a professional, archival transcription service, Audiotranscription.org.

Eventually the interviews and their transcriptions will be uploaded to the College’s digital repository and made freely accessible to the College community as well as to a broad audience regionally, nationally, and internationally. We would like to thank Diana Sanderson, former college archivist, for her role in writing the grant, the director of the sound lab, David Bradshaw and his crew, for digitizing the oral histories, and Asheville’s Ruth Davidson Chapter of the DAR and its Regent, Sharon Byers Conner, for supporting our application. We also thank the Historic Preservation Committee of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution for funding this project. Library Director Chris Nugent will serve as grant manager during the fall of 2021.