The audio recordings and final full-text interview transcripts are housed at Special Collections & University Archives, Alexander Library, and made publicly available to researchers through our website.
In 1997, ROHA became one of the first oral history programs to deliver its material to a global audience through the Internet. In the years since, our online digital archive has been recognized as a world-class oral history resource. Each year, over 33,000 researchers visit our site, which today features over 1,200 fully-transcribed oral histories, nearly 50,000 pages of text.
The prestigious Oral History Online index ranks the site number fifteen in its "Top 100" list, placing ROHA in the company of Columbia University, NASA and the Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Libraries. In their book, World War II on the Web: A Guide to the Very Best Sites, historians J. Douglas Smith and Richard Jensen gave the website five out of five stars. They remarked, "The interviews are superb, by far the best available on the web, and contain a wealth of information that places the war within its broader historical context."
ROHA's original emphasis on interviewing the generation that came of age during the Great Depression and World War II has resulted in many citations in works related to these events and the program's reputation as an unequaled oral history resource on the World War II era. Stories shared with ROHA have appeared in exhibits at the Smithsonian, on History Channel documentaries and in the pages of newspapers and Pulitzer-Prize winning books and are used to educate students from K-12 through graduate levels.
Reaching out to new pools of interviewees, ROHA has emerged as a notable resource on: The Korean War, Cold War, Vietnam War and recent conflicts; The Civil Rights & Women's Rights Movements; Immigration History; Educational History; Rutgers History; The Economic, Social and Cultural History of New Jersey and the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Many ROHA projects involve partnerships. Since 2018, ROHA has collaborated with faculty in the Departments of History and Latino and Caribbean Studies to collect the oral histories of Latinx individuals in communities throughout New Jersey. This led to a collaboration with the Voces Oral History Center at the University of Texas at Austin and its "Voces of a Pandemic" project. Over the same period, ROHA has worked with researchers at the Scarlet and Black, Black Voices and the Black Camden initiatives to conduct interviews of African American alumni, activists and community members.
ROHA moved quickly to document the impact of the pandemic on New Jersey and its people. The ROHA website now features relevant interview collections of people in Rutgers and New Jersey communities, notably those who have been disproportionately affected by the virus and recession. ROHA has supported the interviews Dr. Paul Clemens and Dr. Johanna Schoen have conducted on the pandemic's impact. ROHA and noted documentarian Jody Small have also partnered on a pandemic-focused video interview collection and documentary.