National Life Stories
Since 1987 National Life Stories (NLS) has initiated a series of innovative interviewing projects funded almost entirely from sponsorship, charitable and individual donations.Each NLS project is archived at the British Library and comprises recorded in-depth interviews, plus content summaries and (if funds allow) transcripts to assist users.With Lord Briggs as Chairman and Paul Thompson as Director, an inaugural meeting of the National Life Story Collection (NLS) as a company was held on 11 November 1986, and registration as a charity was obtained in October 1987.The appointment of a Curator in Oral History, whose role would be to work closely with the National Life Story Collection, was made in late 1988 (Dr Rob Perks, who took over from Thompson as NLS Director in 1995).All NLS projects were to follow the in-depth life story approach, starting with family background and childhood, and moving on to education, work and leisure and the community.[6] The project aimed to "record autobiographical interviews with leading British men and women covering their life experience as a whole" with subjects selected from all fields – including politics, industry, administration, the professions, culture or religion – in order to achieve a balance.[7] Another "Special Collection", also begun in 1988, was The Living Memory of the Jewish Community (which ran until 1999);[8] the project was led by Jennifer Wingate and received donations from Lord Young and the Clore Foundation.Although the original concept was broader, the project quickly focused its aims on the recording of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Britain, which at that time had been neglected.[9] This project (helped with funding secured through Martin Paisner and the Edith and Ferdinand Porjes Charitable Trust) culminated with the publication of an educational pack, Voices of the Holocaust (British Library, 1994), edited by Carrie Supple and Rob Perks; the educational pack later became an online web resource on the British Library website, Voices of the Holocaust.The first project to concentrate on the arts was Artists' Lives, which began in 1990 with crucial seed money for five initial interviews provided by the Henry Moore Foundation.The project interviewed nearly 120 of those involved in bookselling from the 1920s through the twentieth century, including secretaries, sales managers, editors and publishers' representatives, and specialists in production and design.A complementary project, Authors' Lives, began in 2007, and includes life story interviews with novelists, poets, biographers, historians and children's writers.Interviewees range from Professors to PhD students and the focus on science is wide, covering academia, big industry and individual entrepreneurship.