One of the projects included in this year’s Orcas Island Community Foundation’s annual Holiday Giving Calendar is Orcas Island Historical Society’s “Saving Orcas Voices” project.

Hidden away in the storage vault behind the Pioneer Museum is a collection of more than 40 tapes containing interviews recorded over the past 30 years. The interviews include residences such as: Bob Schoen, Arthur Reddick and Madilyn Reddick Haffey, Cherie Lindholm, Jane Barfoot-Hodde, Roy and Agnes Flaherty and the Bond brothers.

OIHS has begun the process to capture these interviews digitally, and share them at the museum. Board Member, Harold Lentzner, along with volunteer archivist, Edrie Vinson, have taken the lead in the efforts to preserve the tapes.

Phase 1 in OHIS’s restoration project begins with creating a digital copy of each tape, many of which are old and fragile. Once the tapes have been digitized, they are then transcribed, then matched with photos from the Pioneer Museum’s photo archive, and finally placed into binders available to museum patrons. Some of the binders have already been completed, along with the oral histories collected over the past 30 years, and can currently be viewed at the Pioneer Museum.

Along with more than 40 tapes needing to be digitized, OIHS has recently discovered yet another hundred, or so, tapes that are currently being catalogued. The preservation, digitizing, transcribing, and cataloguing of these additional tapes is Phase 2 of OIHS’s “Saving Orcas Voices,” project.

Once the two phases have been completed, OIHS hopes to begin collecting interviews from current Orcas residence to add to their documents. OIHS’s goal is to have these records to document the social, artistic, cultural, commercial, and agricultural history of Orcas Island.