The packed shelves at the Library of Congress have long housed the biographies of important historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King. But these days, the library is looking to add stories to its collection that portray lives that are far more ordinary.

Like yours.
           
Advances in digital technology and software have dramatically streamlined sound archiving--the process of recording, digitizing and storing audio files and interviews. Sound archiving, a once obscure niche in the field of historical preservation, has become mainstream as more and more institutions have begun to preserve their audio recordings with money from an increasing number of public and private grants.

As a result, it is easier for institutions to collect stories on the everyman and make their audio archives widely available to the public. The Library of Congress, for instance, now showcases half of its extensive audio collection on their Web site.

“Not only has digitizing and preserving sound matured as a technology, the availability of permanent online storage allows us to make audio files easily accessible on the Web for a fraction of the cost,” said George Blood, director of the Safe Sound Archive, a provider of sound archiving services whose clients include the Boston Symphony and the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
   
Rosemary Newnham, assistant director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, says the jump from preserving important sound recordings to documenting the experiences of everyday Americans isn't all that surprising.
 
“The history of who's been interviewed follows the history of oral history,” said Newnham, who is helping coordinate the Notable New Yorkers, an archive of over 180 hours of audio recordings that represents the office's first major initiative in making oral history available online.
      
From its inception in the late 1940s, recorded oral history sought to portray the lives of important people, such as businessman, politicians and leaders in world affairs. But after the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, oral history began to document the experiences of people who were usually outside mainstream history, such as women and minorities. Now there is a “greater focus on the everyman and everywoman,” said Newnham.
   
Story Corps, a nonprofit organization founded in New York in 2003 by documentary radio producer Dave Isay, has enabled average folks to record and store their own oral histories -- and make them available to the public.