Luana Rubin interviews the legendary Jinny Beyer at Not Fade Away, 2013. Watch the full interview here.
The Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories (QSOS) project is a grassroots effort. Almost 300 volunteers have served as QSOS interviewers since 1999, and more than 150 volunteers have served as transcribers. This team of volunteer oral historians have produced more than 1,200 interviews with today’s quiltmakers, now permanently archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress at the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. See our new QSOS collection here.
As we continue to grow QSOS, with a new focus on 21st-century technologies and long-term sustainability, we need your help more than ever.
Our goal is to make our entire QSOS archive accessible and interactive through Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, a new digital tool to synchronize oral history audio, transcripts, keywords, and images. You can see the interviews that have been updated to include audio, and searchable text here.
With over 1200 interviews in our archive, we need your help to achieve this dream! Are you committed to preserving the stories of quiltmakers, organized, interested in learning new skills, and have access to a computer with an internet connection? Then this is the volunteer position for you! All it takes is listening to interviews with quiltmakers, and describing and summarizing what they say. Contact our QSOS Project Manager to learn more and join the team!
Quilt Alliance staff can send you QSOS brochures, a PowerPoint presentation, or, depending on travel required, may be able to schedule a live demonstration and/or workshop for your group. If you are a quilt shop owner or guild member, consider hosting a live interview with a visiting teacher or staff member and invite your customers or guild members to watch. Contact QSOS staff.
This YouTube video was prepared as a training resource for “Team QSOS” — a group of volunteers who conducted QSOS interviews at the 2011 International Quilt Festival. While some information here is specifically included for those volunteers, it is a great introduction to Q.S.O.S. interview basics.
