Need Statement- Sarah SZ

Need Statement

Project: Food Memory Bank: The Museum of Food in America's Oral History Initiative

We are collecting oral histories pertaining to Recipes, Food Memories, Farm Histories, Ethnic food and its integration into American Diet, the creation of the American Diet, Immigrant stories, American Restaurants, Regional Foods, Food trends, Urban Growers and Farmers Markets; these oral histories will become part of our digital archive.

Preserving food memories is a foundational tenant of the Museum of Food in America. The collection and preservation of these oral histories will guide our future exhibition planning and provide a lasting resource to the community. In order to carry out this goal we will need two full time staff members trained in taking oral histories and one full time archivist. We will also need audio recording equipment, sound editing software, digital archiving software, and two dedicated archive computers. In order to obtain the oral histories we will need travel funds to send our historians around the region and translation and transcription services because we are dedicated to being multilingual.

The goals of this project are to collect and archive 1,000 oral histories in a two-year period. We will be coordinating with local, food related organizations in all of our target areas stated above, setting up meetings to inform people about our project to facilitate potential interviewees. The timeline for our project starts with six months of dedicated interviewing, followed by six months of editing and archiving; this process will be repeated the following year.

We will evaluate our progress every year, to make sure we are meeting our stated interview goals and keeping up with archiving and also checking to see if we have any gaps in the types of histories we are obtaining in order to better focus our interviewing in the future.

The budget for this program is $1,000,000. We are requesting $750,000, this money will be used for the purchase of new equipment and software, the salaries for three new employees, employee training, travel expenses and promotional materials. The additional $250,000 will come from a very generous private donation to the museum.