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the research function in this example also supports teaching and learning, there is
considerable overlap with the education function.
Not all oral history projects are historical in nature; some capture current opin-
ion. In collaboration with disciplinary faculty, oral history research projects are
among the growing number of local research collections in both public and aca-
demic libraries. Students associated with a course will utilize the Institutional
Review Board's protocol for ethical research standards involving human subjects,
provide consents, conduct interviews, and then deposit their interview data into the
institutional repository. These interviews are original pieces of research that togeth-
er make up a unique collection or data set that is stored and widely disseminated
by the library and may be supervised by the course instructor.
For example, a faculty member from the College of Education at the University
of Wyoming is leading the way for oral histories to be captured and included in the
Not Just a Teacher
collection. This oral history collection has growing national par-
ticipation as graduate students in education conduct interviews, adding to this oral
history archive.
Librarians are curating local research collections and becoming publishers by
adding value to foster use through ensuring long-term access, sharing, and data
protection for these locally built collections, just as they provide storage and pre-
servation for topics. Research collections may include undergraduate research
presentations, digital research posters, and quantitative and qualitative data sets
in institutional repositories created and managed by academic libraries for their
scholars.
The University of Wyoming Wool Laboratory Collection is one such local re-
search collection. It spans over a century and involves materials including scientific
research in a variety of areas, including wool scouring and processing, agricultural
breeding and nutrition, and the economics of wool to regional ranchers and other
constituencies, such as the American Sheep Industry. This collection has recently
left the College of Agriculture and is now in the library's Emmett D. Chisum Special
Collections, which is involved in a collaborative filming project with Agricultural Ex-
tension to create a Web-supported video resource providing vital information about
this research collection.
The University of Wyoming Wool Laboratory Collection will be curated by cata-
loging the published resources, digitizing part of the unpublished materials, and
conducting a series of oral history interviews to develop a Web-based multimedia
tool that will provide context for the collection. This tool functions as video docu-
mentation; it has a storyboard that enables viewers to choose their own learning
adventure while moving through the historical story of wool science in the region.
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