A West Chester University oral history project 30 years in the making recently came to life in the digital world and won the equivalent of historians’ Oscar: the 2016 Roy Rosenzweig Prize.

WCU’s Charles Hardy III and Janneken Smucker led undergraduate and graduate students over two semesters to assemble an award-winning website titled “Goin’ North: Stories from the First Great Migration to Philadelphia.”

The website features a 500-object digital archive with oral history interview transcripts from the 1980s; interviewee biographies; newspaper articles; images; related websites; GPS coordinates; six digital storytelling projects, including a walking tour; and a video documentary. They were all keyworded, linked, and indexed by WCU students.

“In integrating the work of successive cohorts of students, Goin’ North offers a compelling model of how iterative project development can be made part of teaching,” the prize committee stated.

The WCU undertaking, which this year celebrates 100 years since the Great Migration, has also won awards from the Oral History Association and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives.

Read more about the project on WCU’s website here.