The living archive
for your institution.
The Living Record for institutions is an oral-history collection platform, purpose-built for libraries, museums, universities, and cultural organisations. The same interview engine that captures personal memoirs — scaled for institutional collection workflows, archival standards, and long-term preservation.
An elder interview, preserved
Archival tone, the speaker's own words — this is the deliverable.
An interview film produced by the same engine.
Who uses it
Collect living histories from community members. Build a searchable archive of first-person testimony alongside your existing collections.
Capture donor stories, artefact provenance narratives, and community memory alongside exhibitions.
Longitudinal interview research, oral history methodology courses, primary source collection for dissertations.
Pre-interview research sessions, background material collection, source relationship building. Feeds directly into script and chapter structure.
Preserve neighbourhood stories, immigrant family histories, faith community narratives — story by story, contributor by contributor.
Veterans oral history programmes, elected official legacy records, civil servant exit interviews.
What’s here today
The same interview engine that captures personal memoirs — structured questions, recorded answers, full transcripts.
People, places, events, and organisations extracted from every interview and linked across the collection. Discover connections invisible in individual transcripts.
Records default to private. Selectively publish — or keep everything unlisted.
On the roadmap — talk to us
These institutional capabilities are not shipped product today. We build them with partner institutions, guided by the Oral History Association Best Practices and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative — tell us which ones your collection needs first.
EAD XML, Dublin Core, MARC fields — built to your collection profile as part of an institutional engagement.
Digital consent forms with e-signature and timestamp at the point of interview.
Many interviewers conducting sessions under one institutional account, centrally searchable.
Mapping your institution's subject headings to interview entities.
Stable, citable URLs for finding aids, OPAC, and collections management systems.
Institutional pricing
We don’t publish an institutional price list yet — each engagement is scoped to your collection: how many interviewers, how many records a year, and which archival capabilities from the roadmap we build with you. Individual sessions run on the same pay-per-use pricing as the rest of The Living Record.
Contact us →We work closely with institutions to shape the platform around your archival standards and workflow. Demos include a live interview session and a conversation about the export formats your collections management system would need.
Contact us via the form