Patchwork

The Columbia County Living Archive

Since 1998 BHS students have worked to establish an ongoing collaborative recording of the "living history" of Columbia County including events, people, social issues, historical eras, processes, and architecture and artifacts including the various cultural heritages of our community to showcase the unique aspects of Columbia County serving present and future generations.

The links at the left can be used to navigate, within this section of the website, to the transcripts along with photographs of the interviews conducted to date. The topics are ordered A to Z; click on any link to view the information Patchwork has collected on that topic. This information has been collected by students of the high school, from various individuals in and around the town of Bloomsburg, starting in the year 1998 until 2006. the final link can be used to link to a page containing a number of links to other projects with the same goals as Patchwork.

The Columbia County Living Archive

Bloomsburg High School 's unique oral history project teams a pair of freshmen English students with two sophomore Social Studies who have already completed their project. This “mentor” relationship seems to promote a higher quality of interview questions, photographs, and videos. Below, we have posted our linear procedure for our Patchwork process which involves half our student body from December through May when final projects are due.

• Meet Project Directors, who introduce the project to freshmen. Project Directors are volunteer sophomores who are in charge of the program.
• Select partners from within the freshmen classes.
• Form Sophomore mentor partnership
• Establish topics either through family connections or suggestions from Directors
• Submit the Project Proposal to Project Directors
• Receive approval of the topic
• Complete pre-interview appointment usually by phone. During this time, our students ask biographical questions which are used to connect the interviewee with the topic. We also determine the significance of the topic to the overall history of Columbia County.
• Mentors approve the formal interview questions
• Schedule the formal interview
• Complete the formal interview. During this same time, we videotape the interview and photograph the topic. We also provide a publication release form which is signed, giving us permission to publish the interview.
• Transcript print out for interviewee approval of factual content
• Thank-you cards mailed to interviewees
• Publish final version online with video and still images