Navigating On the Record: A Community History of Guelph

This section is in progress and may be added to as we continue to work on this project! For any questions, send an email to Gracy Go, project editor, at gracymic@uoguelph.ca.

Welcome to On the Record: A Community History of Guelph. This project documents students at the University of Guelph, in the course HIST*3450: Experiential Learning. In this course, students learn about oral histories, their importance, and ways to conduct an ethical and meaningful oral interview with residents at Norfolk Manor in Guelph, Ontario.

To help you browse through the project at ease, this page will provide a general outline of how the project can be navigated.

Main Menu

To browse through the project by interviewee name, click "Course" at the top navigation bar. This will show you a menu on the right hand side of the page that show you most* of the Norfolk Manor residents by name.
If you hover over each interviewee name, it will show you a pop up that indicates which student member interviewed that resident.

*Some residents have been anonymized, but have given permission for their interview to be uploaded onto CWRC. Under "Additional Student Reflections," there are links to student member pages instead of that of residents. The students that are under that tab had interviewees that requested to have none of their information uploaded onto CWRC.

Once you click on an interviewee's name on the menu, you will be taken to their main page that will include the student members' work. These pages serve to contextualize the oral interview prior to listening to the audio file.

You will notice that once you click on an interviewee's name, a subtitle under their name will show another link. These links indicate who the interviewer is, similar to how hovering over the interviewee's name on the main menu will also give you that information.

If you click the link of the student members' names that are located under each interviewee, you will be directed to each student's reflection on the oral history process. Here you may see things like short biographies, self-portraits, and credits to those involved in the interviewing process. These pages do, however, largely serve as a reflection for their interviews, such as what they found difficult, enjoyable, learning obstacles as well as lessons they took away from conducting an oral history and from the course overall.

Another thing you may notice is that some interviewees have two student members assigned to them. Each student member had their own interviewee, but there are a number of student members who wrote additional reflections for other interviewees.

Interviewee Pages (Norfolk Manor Residents)

On many interviewee pages, the audio file to the full interview is almost always toward of the bottom of the page. We encourage you to read through the page, as it offers meaningful context to the interview itself. If you wish to skip the text and jump straight to the interview, there is a link (usually after the introductory paragraph) that will take you to the bottom of the page where you can find a link to the recording. The link will appear as:

Exceptions:

  • Myra Pearce - Myra's interviewer, Nolan McGillivray, linked certain parts of text to snippets of the recording. Those links are available throughout the page if you wish to only hear about one aspect of Myra's life, but the full interview is still linked on the bottom if you wish to listen to all of it.
  • Donald Wadleitgh - Donald's interview does not currently have a full audio recording in our collection. His interviewer, Luke Gelata, also has snippets linked for specific aspects of Donald's history. Unlike the other pages, Donald's page will not have the link to the audio recording right at the beginning, rather, it will be located after each segment that Luke has linked throughout this page.
  • Interviewee pages will always link to the interviewer and (if applicable) other student members who have done an additional reflection on the interview.

Interviewer Pages (Student Members)

These pages, which are linked within the main menu, can be accessed simply by clicking on the Interviewee's name in the list. From there, a link should appear under the Interviewee's name, revealing the student member who interviewed a specific Norfolk Manor resident. They serve as a place for the student members to reflect on their interview and the practice of conducting a proper oral interview. You may also find a short biography of the student member and their photo. Keep in mind that some of these reflections were handed in directly to Dr. Kim Martin, and may not be available in the online collection.

General Browsing Tips

The formatting of each page is different due to the unique nature of each interview! Here are some notes on what to expect on most of the pages of On the Record.

Images

On any page, there may be several photos. These photos can be enlarged if you click on them, but some will simply link back to their original dimensions. Their captions, if linked, will direct you to the original source of the photo. If the caption is not linked, then it means that either the photo could not be traced back to its origin, or it is the original photo of a student member.

Endnotes

You will notice that there are citations within the text on most pages. The full list of works cited will be on pages in which there are citations. Each reference will link directly to the list, and the corresponding number will give you a full citation, including an access link if applicable. Note: Currently, many of these are not accessible to the public, as student members may have consulted works that were found in the University of Guelph library.

Some citations can be found directly in our "Collections" tab under "Bibliography," but many of them are incomplete.