When I moved to Seattle in November 2000, a project I intended to pursue was to do a set of interviews with my parents, possibly to become a book at some point.  Both of them were born pre-Baby Boom, in 1939 and 1942.  I figured there could be some fascinating insights about the ways our culture has changed over the past 60-odd years, especially regarding the influence of television and similar technologies.  The project never occurred; my father died from brain cancer in April 2001.

Similarly, the Seattle leather community has lost many significant members over the years.  (Not that this is unique to Seattle.)  Especially poignant in this was the December 2003 death of Dave Lewis, president and one of the charter members of Seattle Men in Leather.  Dave’s death made me realize how much of the history of the leather community is known only to a select few, usually the people who experienced it firsthand.  They will gladly share their stories, but they have to be asked.

In January 2005, I encountered the StoryCorps booth in Grand Central Terminal in New York City.  StoryCorps is a national project to get people to tell their stories to one another, to record them and archive them for posterity.  StoryCorps in turn was inspired by a similar oral history archival project during the Depression, done by the WPA (Works Progress Administration).  For more information of StoryCorps, visit the chain of National Public Radio stories about the project.

Professionally, I work in software testing, and in 2004-2005, I worked on a project which included Contact for “metadata” – loosely, all the information about an item which is not “content”, such as the author, the creation date, camera exposure settings on a photo, keywords, and so forth.  The “metadata” about oral history data – the interviewer, the date of the interview, transcribers and editors, etc. – and expansion of both the content and the metadata via comments from others will be important to this project.