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achievements that are threatened by vanishing from our historical perspective need to be made
visible and vivid again to be experienced and to add to the historic awareness of men and women in
the Dutch society of today.
People who have been closely involved in important (historical) events, or who experienced a
sociological or historical event themselves, are able to share their experiences and to tell about “how
they experienced it” from the first hand. These stories of life provide a second contextual dimension
for the paper archives. Together the spoken words and the written words help to create a more
complete picture of history. Therefore Atria started in 2006 with producing oral history interviews to
document women’s lives in all its aspects.
The original idea at that time was to create an oral history interview archive of over 100
interviews to document the entire span of the feminist movements of the second half of
the 20 th century. The project was called “Moving Women’s History”, and the video interviews
focused on women who have been pioneers in the Women’s Health Care in the 70ties of the last
century, on the so called “Dolle Mina’s” – the Dutch women’s activist group from the sixties and
seventies of the 20 th century, who fought for emancipation of women in society and on the “Rooie
Vrouwen”, the social‐democratic women in the Netherlands.
In the meantime the focus of the oral history collection of Atria has been broadened with
interviews on sociological relevant topics, such as migration, politics and the second world war.
One of my favourite Oral History projects at Atria is Back in a Bite, a project in which a mother and
a daughter picked out an old family dish to prepare, and during the preparation of the dinner and
after the diner the mother was interviewed on her experiences as migrant woman in the Dutch
society. The life stories and family recipes of first generation Chinese, Turkish and Philippine migrant
women in The Netherlands are not very well known: they don’t have a tradition of written history
recording. In this project, cooking was used as a connecting element and a platform for storytelling.
Life stories and family recipes are strongly connected. And as it was so nicely put in the project pitch
documentation: the smell and taste of food belong to the earliest memories of the human being.
Talking about family recipes from the home country therefore can easily serve as catalysts for further
memories of life, which lead to a complete picture of the cultural context in which migrant women
have grown up. Some of the fragments have been made available through You Tube, to attract also
the general public. 6
Some of the oral history interviews Atria made are available online through the Atria website. This
always depends on the copyright legislation and the permission of the interviewee. Often, when an
interview is not available online, it can be watched on site in the library.
Due to budget restraints, the production of an oral history interview for the Atria collection is nine
out of ten times done on a project basis and with external funding. The interviews are done by a
professional interviewer, assisted by a camera woman. Interviews often take a full day. Before
starting an interview thorough desk research is done. The desk research must result in background
documentation, including biographic information and literature on the topic that will be discussed, or
the movement in which the interviewee is active, and also in a topic list for the interview. And in
most cases a half day meeting with Atria staff takes place before the interview is planned, to provide
the interviewer with additional information beforehand. By having the interview not only registered
on tape, but also on camera ‐ according to specific standards that make the sources available for
scientific re‐use ‐ we add extra source value: not only verbal information, but also non‐verbal
information (mimics, body language) is recorded. 7
As a library source, the oral history interview falls in the category of audio visual sources. At the same
time, the oral history interview as a record of a life story is seen as a modern follow up of written ego