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Executive Summary:

    The Our Town Library in conjunction with the Our Town High School has created a joint project of preserving our community’s history through storytelling.  This would be a long term creative process, involving many different community members from the PTA, local community groups, professional advisors and lots of children interacting with adults over 55 years of age to answer three significant questions to preserve their stories and those of this community.  The three significant questions focus on favorite author read, describe a typical summer and school day and memories of Thanksgiving and Fourth of July celebrations of the time that corresponds with the age of the questioner to create a continuity and bond between the seeker and provider of information.  This project would encourage inter-generational connections, long term literacy and preservation of oral history through the art of storytelling, 

Initially, there would be an all day storytelling event, with four professional storytellers presenting stories, both true and fabled, at two different times to the whole community. Two storytellers would present at the Our Town Library in the evening while the other two storytellers would present in the afternoon at the Our Town High School.  There would then be two workshops held on the following two Saturdays for learning skills in acquiring and writing the information into stories for the estimated 20-25 high school students who were interested in fulfilling their community service through this process. Librarians, high school teachers and other community professionals would lead these workshops. These events would start in early October, so that there would be the support of the student’s teachers, and time to collect and perfect these stories.  The high school students would then access these senior citizens through nursing homes, the Our Town senior center, the Our Town Library friends group, local community groups and perhaps their own family members. These students would collect a three to four stories, which they would create into a five to ten minute story for the storytelling event.  An additional three Saturday workshops would then be available to help those who have collected stories turn them into oral presentations. Then in the spring, these students would have a chance to tell their stories of their elders at storytelling events, this time to younger children and to the community during National Library Week, connecting the two integral but separate components of this community. 

The Our Town Librarians will be directing and managing the whole process, since the library belongs to the whole community. This is a more natural setting for single people, young preschool families and older adults, thereby being more inclusive for everyone.   The Our Town Teen Librarian will be lead coordinator between library staff, high school English, history and sociology teachers and community organizations.   In addition, the Our Town Library will be the facilitator for binding the student’s finished written stories and preserving the storytelling event through both audio and visual means that are appropriate for long term archival and retrieval for the whole community.  At the end of this initial ten-month project, there would be 60 to 100 oral history stories preserved in the Library’s archives.  Envisioned is a three year cycle of renewing this oral history collection from Our Town.