NEW YORK, December 12, 2002 - The Columbia University Oral History Research Office (OHRO), a unit of the Libraries, has received a grant of $48,000 from The Rockefeller Foundation to support the second year of work on the "September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project." The funds will be used to hire a project coordinator. Through a timely grant of $132,894 in October 2001 from the Rockefeller Foundation, OHRO conducted 120 interviews with American and immigrant Muslims, Latinos, and Afghans as well as artists whose work and lives were affected by the aftermath of the events.

The "September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project" is a collaboration between the Oral History Research Office, directed by Mary Marshall Clark, and the Institute for Social and Economic Policy and Research, directed by Peter Bearman. The project has now interviewed more than 400 people in a broad number of categories who live in the New York region and a number who live in Washington, D.C. The project is also supported by Columbia University.

Clark said, "The financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation for hiring this critically important position will allow us to continue our longitudinal oral history project." She continued, "The project coordinator will also help us create greater public awareness of the plight of many immigrants and survivors whose stories may not have been recorded in the mass media."

The Columbia University Oral History Research Office is the oldest and largest university-based oral history program open to the public in the world. Founded in 1948 by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Allan Nevins, the oral history collection now contains nearly 8,000 taped memoirs, and nearly 1,000,000 pages of transcript. Over 2,000 scholars a year consult the interviews from the oral history collection archived at Columbia University.

Columbia University Libraries is one of the top ten academic library systems in the nation, with 7.5 million volumes, 49,000 serials, as well as extensive collections of electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms and other non-print formats. The collections and services are organized into 22 libraries, supporting specific academic or professional disciplines. The Library's web site is a gateway to the print and electronic collections and to services.