The interviews cover a wide range of social and cultural developments in America and abroad, from the birth of the children's television show Sesame Street to Carnegie Corporation's efforts to support antiapartheid efforts in South Africa. The remarkable consistency of the Corporation's grant-making activities in areas like education, and its long involvement in southern Africa, demonstrate the impact of sustained programs over nearly a century.
The first iteration of this project was conducted using the methodology the Oral History Research Office (OHRO) developed under its first director, Allan Nevins. The transcript was seen as a substitute for the book, and the audio was rarely consulted. Video was introduced in the second phase of the project to explore ways in which the story of Carnegie Corporation's history and grant making could be disseminated to a wider audience. In this phase, 206 hours of audio interviews and 65 hours of video interviews were conducted. Carnegie Corporation awarded the OHRO a special grant to explore the transition of oral history into video, using its own history as a test case to determine how the public and scholarly dimensions of oral history could be merged. In this way the Corporation supported the OHRO in expanding the discipline of oral history while creating a record of the Corporation's past. For a discussion of how different media formats shape the practice of oral history, see Oral History Process.
In order to promote greater scholarly and public use of this rich archive representing nearly a hundred years of Carnegie Corporation's work in philanthropy, the final phase of its oral-history project has been to develop a dedicated Web site in collaboration with the Columbia University Libraries, thus creating a living portal into this unique historical archive.
This site presents video interviews and transcripts and serves as a final report on the OHRO's activities as well as a demonstration of the expansion of oral history into the visual realm.