“We believe that the history of the Peace Corps lies within the unique experience of each Peace Corps Volunteer. Thus, the goal of the Project is to build up a comprehensive collection of firsthand narratives by those who have served. These interviews epitomize the special character of Peace Corps service — we are part of the Peace Corps project but we serve as individuals.”
How the Project Works
The RPCV Oral History Archives Project is volunteer run. RPCV volunteers interview fellow RPCVs, Peace Corps staff and host country counterparts. The leadership team works with partner archives to prepare interviews for access to the public. It also partners with Country of Service RPCV groups and others on special projects. It produces videos on special topics using clips from oral history interviews. These are accessible on the OHAP website.
Where the Interviews Live
Interviews are archived at the University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Since its inception in 1999, more than 2,100 interviews have been recorded and archived. Our Interview Map plots them by country of service.
More than 520 of the interviews held in the JFK Library’s Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection were recorded on audiocassette tape before OHAP moved to digital recording in 2015; most have since been digitized, with about 75 tapes still to go — see the Donate page for details. Interviews recorded since 2015 are digital from the start and can be accessed online right away.
Digitizing & Indexing
OHAP is working with the JFK Library to digitize early analog voice recordings held at their archive. We’re producing indexes – structured, time-stamped summaries – of video interviews in the Nunn Center archive to improve users’ ability to quickly navigate and understand the interview’s key topics and when they occur in the interview. In addition, we’re beginning to use an AI-driven transcription system developed by the Nunn Center to create written transcripts to increase access to these interviews by hearing impaired users.
