Roots with Wings, a Floyd County Place-Based Education Project:: Intergenerational Connections

Floyd Story Center

Since 1998, a community oral history collection partnership of the Old Church Gallery, Ltd., Radford University’s Center for Social and Cultural Research, Honors Program, Scholar-Citizen Initiative, Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center, and Floyd County High School. Our archives now hold over 100 interviews.

In our Roots with Wings project, college mentors, high school staff, and community volunteers meet weekly during the school year to teach the discipline of oral history collection.


Students learn ethical, methodologically sound interview techniques, practice and complete several interviews, transcribe the audiotapes, create searchable content logs, archive interviewee resources and period photographs, learn the technology of audio and video recording, research historical backgrounds, acquire proficiency in iMovie and storytelling, and finally extract a theme from an hour long interview to create a seven minute movie production.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Computer History Museum Donation

Canon VideoCam Retires to California


In 2007, the Floyd Story Center initiated an oral history interview series based on the WWII-era and the Great Depression at Floyd County High School. During that year, Doug Thompson, nationally-known videographer, donated his professional Canon XL1S video camera for student use. 


It was a treat to bring professional equipment on site, raising the bar for quality filming and student skills. However, after nine years of dedicated use, the use of tape-based recording lost out to digital files and we retired the trusty Canon to our cabinet.


When Kathleen noticed that the Computer History Museum in Fremont, California, had the very same camera on their wish list, she contacted the archivist there.  The camera arrived safely this month and is now part of the famed museum's archives.  

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