John Novak Digital Interview Collection

John Novak Digital Interview Collection

The John Novak Digital Interview Collection is an online collection of audio interviews of African-Americans living in Detroit and those who participated in the Greensboro Sit-ins of 1960. The Interviews were done by students who were asked to interview their relatives. The subsequent interviews were collected by Michael Barnes of the Marygrove College Library and made available online.

The interviews are made available online in MP3format. Included with these interviews are Interview Index and transcripts. The site also provides simple browsing or search functions. The browsing function links to a page that indexes all the interviews. The search function leaves much to be desired. It seems as if the index does not include enough searchable features to provide an ample search. Keywords such as sit-in, and Jim Crow do not produce any results despite the fact that these two words are directly related to the themes of the interviews.

The archive allows users to quoted and reproduced use all sound recordings, transcriptions, and images from the collection so long as they are for private or educational purposes. The only stipulation is that proper citation be provided. More so, under fair use policy, the library allows users to create reproductions of single copies of all items.