Communities of Memory was a project funded by the Alaska Humanities Forum in the mid-1990s to collect stories from Alaskans that represent the meaning of community. Storytelling sessions were held in Nome, Fairbanks, Wasilla, Homer, Kotzebue, Juneau, Unalaska, Bethel, and Kenai/Soldotna. Dr. Pat Partnow was the co-designer and Statewide Project Director. All the sessions were videotaped by Jim Sykes and Western Media Concepts and these recordings are stored at the Oral History Office in the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections at Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The book "Communities of Memory" (Phyllis Morrow, editor. Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska NS, Volume 3, Number 1, 2003) reflects on the themes and meaning of the overall project.
The original Nome Communities of Memory Jukebox project was created in 2007 and was funded by the Alaska Humanities Forum. The project was a collaboration between the Oral History Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) and Dr. Bob Jansen, founder of the Australian Centre for Oral History in Erskineville, New South Wales, Australia. This project utilized Jansen's pioneering Testimony Software to simultaneously deliver video, photographs and transcripts and a table of contents index. Bob met Project Jukebox staff at the International Oral History Association Conference in Sydney, Australia in July 2006. The two organizations felt that this technology offered an exciting opportunity for providing oral histories on the Internet that fit with Jukebox's mission of broad-based, creative and interactive access to oral history. The videos were digitized and the Jukebox was created by Karen Brewster of UAF's Oral History Program's Project Jukebox office, with assistance from UAF Northern Studies graduate student, Stacey Carkhuff.
In December 2013, the Nome Communities of Memory Jukebox was revised into a Drupal format to keep up with changing technology and to match the new standard format for all Jukebox projects. This updating was also funded by a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum. The update was done by Lisa Hamby and Karen Brewster of the Project Jukebox office.
This project is supported in part by a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum and the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.