Beyond “Filling The Gaps”: University Students’ Engagement With Digital Oral History Collections

This study investigates how university students engage with digital oral history collections, exploring their motivations and behaviors of use. Despite the archival field's growing interest in digital user studies, oral history collections remain critically understudied. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews with university students in North Carolina, this research examines multiple dimensions of engagement, including navigational behavior, use of metadata, transcript versus audio use, and affective responses during engagement. Thematic analysis of interviews suggests that students engage deeply and meaningfully with oral histories on digital platforms, forming personal connections with material and using oral history to construct historical narratives. While transcripts facilitated discovery and evaluation, students also demonstrated robust engagement with interview audio, though digital interfaces frequently presented navigational challenges. Access was frequently mediated by instructors, librarians, or archivists. This study generates an initial framework for future digital oral history user studies and offers implications for interface design, pedagogy, and archival outreach.