HAYS, Kan. – One-room schools across Kansas are brought back to life through the new oral history collection available online from Forsyth Library at Fort Hays State University.

The FHSU College of Education One Room Schoolhouse Oral History Collection in Forsyth Digital Collections saved and preserved a valuable record of the history of education in rural Kansas.

The collection consists of 213 oral histories featuring interviews with former one-room schoolhouse teachers and students who talk about the curricula, classroom conduct, and educational norms. In addition to providing insight into the origins of education in rural Kansas, the interviews bring out the local history, ancestry, social and cultural expectations of the one-room school era, and insight to life during the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, and other significant historical events.

The interviews are primary sources for regional history and supplement other materials that reside in Forsyth Special Collections and the University Archives.

“The interviews were conducted between 1977 and 1997 by students in the graduate-level History of American Education class taught by retired FHSU professor Dr. Allan Miller. The capstone project for the class was to make a cassette tape interview with teachers who had worked in one-room schools in Kansas,” said Elizabeth Downing-Turner, digital curation librarian and lead of this significant digitization and preservation project.

“Audio tapes,” she said, “even under good circumstances, eventually de-magnetize, and some of these cassettes, exposed to far-from-perfect conditions, were already in bad shape.”

Contracting specialists to convert analog tapes to digital files was prohibitively expensive, so Downing-Turner began researching options. Over 20 months, 247 cassette tapes were digitized using an inexpensive converter and software Forsyth Library already had to restore the sound, reduce background noise, and enhance audio to improve the user experience of the collection.

“By migrating this media to digital, the original cassette tapes can be preserved in the University Archives while the digital surrogates are available for research use,” said Downing-Turner.

“The remastered digital files will be preserved in Forsyth Library’s digital preservation system so the material remains accessible over time,” she said.

Representing 67 Kansas counties and with nearly 200 hours of material, this collection has great research potential for genealogy research and for research in the fields of education and history. The collection is searchable by interviewer name, interviewee name, location, and school name.

“It is such a gift to share with the entire world, bridging the past and the present so thoughtfully,” said Dr. Robb Scott, assistant professor of advanced education programs at FHSU.

“I believe the One Room Schoolhouse Oral Histories are a real treasure for FHSU and the global community utilizing Forsyth resources,” he said.

The One Room Schoolhouse Oral History Collection, with many other digital collections of life and culture of the university and region, is accessible through Forsyth Digital Collections (contentcat.fhsu.edu/digital).

For more information about the digital collections, contact Downing-Turner at medowning@fhsu.edu.