Provenance

Where this collection came from, who made each part of it, and what the Library did to it.

Provenance is the answer to a plain question: how do you know? For every page in this collection the Library can say who recorded the words, who typed them, who checked them, when they were printed, where the tape is, which file the text came from, and what was done to that file. This page states it for the collection as a whole; each item page states it for itself.

The plainest fact about this collection first. Bob Zybach publishes the fifteen monographs, his 1999 thesis and the 1989 Auto Tour himself, as PDFs on his own site, and he has done for years. The Library's pages mirror that printed text page for page, with his participation; his written permission for this working edition is being recorded and the formal instrument follows. What the Library adds is around the text, not in it: the page anchoring, the indexes, the place and people pages, the timeline. Who holds which rights in the underlying material is a separate question, answered group by group on Rights, use, and takedown.

Provenance

Creator: Dr. Bob Zybach
Originating bodies: OSU Research Forests and College of Forestry (Soap Creek monograph series); NW Maps Co., the creator’s own imprint (thesis, books, tours); Oregon Websites and Watershed Project, Inc. (Elliott, Alberta Street, Osbornes)
Received: Uploaded by the creator, 2026-05-20, 2026-05-21, 2026-06-18, 2026-08-23, 2026-08-24
Accession statement: Accessioned from Bob Zybach's upload of the 'ORWW Special Collection' shared Drive folder, together with material fetched from his public project sites nwmapsco.com and orww.org. Every item record carries its source URL or Drive path and a SHA-256 checksum of the file that was read.
Rights: This is a working edition, published with the creator’s permission while rights and consultation reviews continue. The material here was made at different times, under different agreements, by different people, so each part of the collection carries its own rights statement rather than one label across all of it. The indexes and apparatus are the Library’s own work and an open licence for them is under consideration. How the Library decides what it can publish, and how to ask for a change: /collections/zybach/rights/

Chain of custody

Recorded. The Soap Creek sessions run from July 1975 to August 1995, on cassette; the Elliott State Forest interviews and field trips from 2017 to 2019, with field-trip and lecture videos to 2024. Two earlier tapes Bob collected and posted with the Elliott material — Herman Larson, interviewed by John and Maralee Brelage — were recorded on 8 October 1962 and 11 November 1965.
Who asked the questions. The 1978–1980 sessions were conducted for the Oregon State University College of Forestry by Royal G. Jackson and Jennifer A. Lee — Paul M. Dunn (1978–79), William A. Davies (1979) and Marvin Rowley (1979) — and by Jackson with Karen Thomas for Edward Sekermestrovich (1980). SCARC lists Jackson, Lee, Zybach, the College of Forestry and the Research Forests' Soap Creek Valley History Project as the creators of OH 006. The two earliest Soap Creek sessions, with Bessie Murphy in July and August 1975, were recorded by Judy Carlson. From 1989 Bob Zybach conducted the sessions, sometimes with a second interviewer: Neil Vanderburg (#03), Kevin Sherer (#06 and #12), Angela C. Sondenaa (#07), George B. Wisner (#08), Janet Meranda (#09), and Judy Carlson, Marlene Finley and Phil Hays (#11). Every name here is taken from the citation the monograph prints in its own front matter. On the Elliott, Bob Zybach conducted the interviews; the November 2019 group interview at the Coos History Museum was led by Steve Greif. Most Soap Creek sessions were recorded in the narrators' homes or at the places being discussed.
Transcribed and audited. Transcripts were typed, checked against the tape, and then sent to the narrator. Narrators corrected and approved them before printing. This is why the printed transcript, not the tape, is the authoritative text of the Soap Creek series — and why the Library does not "fix" what a narrator approved.
Printed and published. Fifteen numbered monographs, 1990–2009, by the OSU Research Forests and College of Forestry, Bob Zybach series editor; the 1989 Auto Tour booklet; the 1999 M.A.I.S. thesis. Front matter in each volume names the people at each step.
Put online by the creator. Scanned PDFs on nwmapsco.com; the Elliott recordings, transcripts, maps and photographs on orww.org; videos on the ORWWmedia YouTube channel. These remain the published originals.
Where the originals went. Two statements, and nothing between them is the Library's own account. Bob Zybach's 1999 thesis describes the project's own practice, p. 51: In most instances, master copies of monographs were stored at Research Forests offices, original tape recordings were sent to the Oral History Department of the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, Oregon, and original maps, correspondence, photographs, photograph copies, and copies of tape recordings were sent to OSU Archives in Corvallis, Oregon. The OSU Special Collections and Archives Research Center's acquisition note for OH 006 describes how what it holds arrived: The published transcripts were transferred to the Archives by the Research Forests regularly as they were issued between 1991 and 1996. The sound recordings, as well as published transcripts and related materials, were part of the Horner Museum oral history collections until they were transferred to the Archives in 1996. Materials donated by Bob Zybach to the Archives in 2009 were organized into this collection in 2017. For the Elliott, SCARC's acquisition note reads in full: Collection materials were donated to SCARC by Bob Zybach in 2019. Bob's reforestation business records are held at OSU as the Bob Zybach Collection (MSS Zybach).
Uploaded to the Library's working Drive. 2026-05-20, 2026-05-21, 2026-06-18, 2026-08-23, 2026-08-24, by the creator: three branches — Soap Creek, Elliott, and a wildfire and restoration folder. Folder paths were preserved as received.
Described here. The Library read the files, extracted the text and the structure, and built this description. It did not rewrite the words. See the colophon for exactly what was done and what was not.

Published originals

Every item page links to the creator's own copy. These are the index pages those links point into.

The same material elsewhere

A researcher who needs the tape, not the transcript, should go to Oregon State. The Library describes; OSU preserves.

OH 006 — Soap Creek Valley History Project Oral Histories, 1978–2009 : "2.2 cubic feet (91 audiocassettes; 20 photographs; 5 boxes)", dated 1978–2009 with predominant dates 1990–1995. Open for research.
OH 047 — Elliott State Forest Oral History Collection, 2017–2022 : "15 audiocassette tapes; 2.24 GB born digital including 136 digital photographs." Open for research. SCARC's finding-aid page carries the Center's standard footer, "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License" — that statement is on the page describing the collection, and describes SCARC's own finding aid. It is not a licence on the recordings, the transcripts or the photographs, and nothing here should be read as one.
OH 005 — Rex Wakefield interview (1989) and Applegate Trail commentary (1991) .
MSS Zybach — the Bob Zybach Collection, reforestation business records, 1972–1990 . Described in this collection; not published here.

What was excluded, and why

The upload contained material that does not belong in a public archive: bank statements, a credit report, corporate tax filings, invoices, a voided check. None of it was read past identification, none of it is described here, and none of it was deleted — exclusion is the Library's act; deletion would be the creator's. The same rule governs personal data inside the transcripts themselves: pages carrying home addresses, telephone numbers or the names of children are held — each held page keeps its number and its address and carries the same notice — rather than quietly cut. The reasons are kept in the Library's records and on the rights page, not printed page by page.

Pages describing the locations of American Indian burial, grave or artifact sites are held, and so are the index entries, place pages and timeline entries that would lead a reader to them. They stay held while the Library consults the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. Printing a passage in a monograph in 1993 and putting a searchable point on a public map in 2026 are not the same act, and the second one is the Library's. Kalapuya history itself is not withheld: what is held is where things are. Rights, use, and takedown sets out the reasoning and how to ask us to change it.

How to check the Library's work

Each item page carries the source file it was built from and a checksum of that file. Where the Library inferred something — a speaker turn recovered from typography, a coordinate derived from a place name, a date read from context — the page says inferred and names the method. Where a source contradicts another source, both are recorded and the item is marked as a conflict. A blank field means the document did not say; it never means the Library guessed.

Finding aid · Colophon · How to cite · Rights, use, and takedown · Errata · Submit a correction