About Memoar

Memoar - The Norwegian Organization for Oral History, is a national powerhouse for the collection and dissemination of oral history. We are member of IOHA - International Oral History Association, the Norwegian Federation of Cultural Heritage Organisations and the Norwegian Local History Association . We host an annuar oral history conference for Scandinavia. Feel free to get in touch!

oral history in norway:

Collecting of memories and life stories has been going on since mid 19th century in Norway - still Memoar was the first modern oral history organisation when we were founded in 2015.

We collect, preserve and disseminate oral history interviews in video format. Our slogan - «Everybody has a story to share» - reflects a collective responsibility for transferring the story of our times to future generations.

The recorded interviews remains the intellectual property of the interviewee (and the interviewer). We encourage people to share their stories in public archives and in social media.

We log the interviews with detailed keywords and timecodes. The viewer can find interesting sequences in minutes at memoar.no.

The Memoar story

We believe that everybody can interview. We are encouraging public libraries to establish interview studios for anyone to use, and public archives to recieve documented interviews from anyone. Our vision is a huge public collection of documented oral history videos from our times, to be used by researchers as well as heirs or artists or other parts of future and present public.

Interviews on video. Seeing the interviewee telling her/his stories gives the user better understanding and more information than audio only, and substantially more than reading transcripts. Our experience is that people are positive to documentation on video.

We do not transcribe. To change a video recording into a text document means to reduce it from a primary source to a secondary. Instead, we copy the filmmaker's method for documentation of her/his footage

Memoar, Norwegian organisation for oral history, was founded (2015) by persons with background from media and media developement.

Anne Marie Kollhus: Manager and Chair of the board. Retired police investigator. Activist in local history movement.

amk@memoar.no

Cathrine Hasselberg: Journalist, oral historian, author and podcaster. Project manager im Memoar, Oslo.

cathrine@memoar.no

Sebastian Kvamsdal Kaasa is historian and project manager in Memoar, Bergen. Specia linterest: Migration history, local and political history.

sebastian@memoar.no

Bjørn Enes: Journalist and oral historian. Founded Memoar in 2015. Special interest: Industry and seafaring history.

bjorn@memoar.no

July 2023: XXII IOHA international conference:

The conference "Oral History in a Digital and Audiovisual World" takes place in Rio de Janeiro on July 25-28th. See the conference webpage here. Bjorn Enes, (founder of Memoar) is participating with this presentation:

IOHA2023-Oral history is intangible heritage

ShortLecture-OralHistory-UkraineProject2022

Lecture

When thousands of Ukrainean refugees came from February 2022, we made this lecture in English for information to new members who did not speak Norwegian.

UkrainE

We followed up in June 2022, with the first concentrated course in English about Memoars methods. First target group were Ukrainean activists in Memoar.

oral history

The invoovement of Ukrainean activists have made it possible for us to collect oral history from Ukrainean refugees in Ukraniean. We also learned a lot from them.