About the Soap Creek collection
Indexes and timeline
- The Series Index The back-of-book indexes of all fifteen books, merged and made live: 1,823 headings and 12,618 page references, every one of them a link.
- Places 1,066 named places, 281 of them with coordinates — what every narrator said about each, with page citations.
- People Narrators, interviewers, transcribers and auditors: their sessions, the places they speak of, and where others mention them.
- Timeline 1,523 dated statements, verbatim from the transcripts and the thesis chronology, sorted into the creator's own periods. Where two narrators remember a date differently, both are kept and the disagreement is marked. Before 1844 · 1845–1859 · 1860–1890 · 1891–1920 · 1921–1940 · 1941–1950 · 1951–1970 · 1971–1995 · 1996–2026 · Undated
Collection at a glance
- 15printed books
- 1,591printed pages
- 21people interviewed
- 1,066places named
- 1,823index headings
- 12,618index references
- 1,523dated statements
- 173photographs described
Two different things get counted about a place and they will never agree: how often the printed indexes point at it, and how often its name occurs in the transcripts. Both are true, and the place pages print both, labelled.
About this series
What it is
The Soap Creek Valley History Project: interviews recorded between 1975 and 1995 and printed as fifteen numbered books between 1990 and 2009 by the Oregon State University Research Forests and the College of Forestry, with the 1989 Auto Tour and the 1999 master's thesis that used them as evidence.
Who recorded it
Royal G. Jackson and Jennifer Lee began recording in 1978; Karen Thomas joined in 1980; Bob Zybach, who edited the series and carried it into print, recorded from 1989. Research assistants, students and transcribers worked on the books as well, and each book names its own contributors on its own pages. About Bob Zybach.
What is held back
A small number of pages carry personal details about named people — home addresses, telephone numbers, tax lots, children's names. Those pages are present and citable, but their text is replaced by a notice saying the page is held. Nothing is silently removed, and a held page can be requested. Content note.
The originals
The creator publishes every one of these books himself, as PDFs, at nwmapsco.com; the pages here link to his copy rather than making a second one. The tapes are at the Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center, described as OH 006, Soap Creek Valley History Project Oral Histories, 1978–2009. A reader who needs the tape rather than the transcript should go there.
Citing and rights
How to cite · Use or removal requests · Provenance · Errata · Colophon · The whole collection
