The Randforce Associates, LLC

The Buffalo NY Public School District completed its first three-year TAH grant in 2007, focused on high school teachers and in 2008 began a second $1M TAH project focused on 4th and 7th grade teachers and the collaborative compilation of multi-media resource, content, and pedagogy kits for innovative American History teaching. The Randforce component helps teachers explore and use 150 hours of indexed audio and video oral histories in twelve distinct data sets for use in preparing these kits. The new project also involves student-conducted family and community oral histories that will then be added to these historical database resources.
In Cleveland, Ohio, teachers in “Sounds of American History,” the region’s $2m TAH Grant, have worked intensively with a 40 hour collection of regional World War II Oral Histories conducted by the Western Reserve Historical Society, for which Randforce and Cleveland State University project directors had developed a thematically mapped audio database. A second cohort worked with more than fifteen years of the Cleveland City Club broadcast forums, digitized and database indexed from the original reel-to-reel recordings. Under another CSU TAH project, “Rivers, Roads, and Rails,” teachers have been exploring and using a database accessing some sixty hours of interviews focused on canal and transportation history in Ohio.

Randforce is a major partner in The Illinois State Museum’s effort to develop and index an extensive oral history of Illinois agriculture, and to migrate this to a flexible, interactive web interface for exploring the collection. The project is funded via a $560K IMLS Leadership Grant.
Randforce has partnered with Arkansas Educational Television (AETN) to index a 200 hour collection of WWII video oral histories, making excerpts easily available for the station’s production of an Arkansas World War II documentary, and for a unique website presentation in which video interviews are explorable by theme at the passage level, across interviews.
The History Makers is a Chicago-based national initiative building a remarkable archive of life histories of African Americans. Having produced a small-scale interactive database of indexed childhood stories from the collection for use in classroom and similar settings, Randforce is part of a consortium of universities and libraries that are beta-testing the result of The History Maker’s large-scale collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s Informedia Library, a unique 400+ interview, 1200 hour video collection funded by an IMLS grant.

Randforce has worked with The Multicultural History Society of Ontario, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the University at Buffalo Art Gallery on oral history indexing projects, developing new approaches for quickly turning small collections into accessible resources that can be further refined for research and presentation on-demand by users.
Randforce is partnering with The Foundation for the History of Women in Medicine to conduct and digitally index oral history interviews of the first recipients of the Foundation’s prestigious Alma Dea Morani MD Renaissance Woman in Medicine Award. We have also indexed a previously conducted oral history of a major figure in pioneering pediatric surgery, Louise Schnaufer, MD, from which we produced a multi-media tribute to Dr. Schnaufer at the 2008 award ceremony.

In less than five months, working closely with Randforce, a consortium of small historical societies in Niagara County, New York developed from scratch a 20 hour oral history project documenting a World War II POW Camp housed at Fort Niagara and richly involved in local life and memory, indexed it by theme, and combined audio and video passages with photos, maps, and other documents in a dramatic one hour slide show featured at a national conference about the POW camp history and recognized with an Award of Merit in 2008 by the AASLH.

The New York Council for the Humanities is working with Randforce and InterClipper to record, annotate, and then thematically cross-reference its board meetings, task forces, grant review committees, and public meetings, in order to have a comprehensive record of proceedings accessible for evaluation, training, and public presentation purposes
The Baldy Center for Law and Policy, University at Buffalo Law School, has made InterClipper software and Randforce training available for faculty members interested in making analytic and presentational use of recorded conference proceedings, both archived and live, as well as for recorded focus group and community-meeting recordings in other research projects.

Randforce completed its digitization and indexing of Nan Clarkson’s 150 hour reading of the personal journal she kept for over forty years. The entire digital collection is now on the Clarkson family’s computer and iPod, mapped and sortable by themes at the journal-entry level, any of which recording can be instantly accessed. Several subcollections selected around major themes of personal and historical interest were recently produced and documented.
The University at Buffalo Law School Alumni Association has extended its pioneering digitally indexed oral history project, including new interviews conducted at reunions and video documentation of major events and testimonials.