"It is a way to have an intimate conversation with someone you love and know that the recording will live on and be in the Library of Congress,” said Nora Levine, who manages the facilitators who record sound at StoryCorps. "Everyday stories are what this country is about.”
 
StoryCorps has set up two broadcast quality recording booths in New York City (one in Grand Central Station and one near Ground Zero. For a suggested donation of $10, they offer a 40-minute time slot in which two people, usually friends or relatives, interview each other, while a StoryCorps staff member records them. The audio files are then sent to the archive in the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress.

StoryCorps plans to record 250,000 stories over the next 10 years. In addition to the New York locations, they have two mobile booths crisscrossing the country in search of people who want to record interviews.

Not everyone is comfortable with the direction sound archiving is moving. Barbara Haws, the director of the New York Philharmonic Archives, said she would likely not enter the field if she were starting her career now. “Archiving used to be about appraisal, now we’re just collecting everything. Not everything is worth collecting,” she said.

But according to George Blood, the sound archivist, the value of oral history and audio preservation projects cannot be overstated.
   
“We've worked on 2,700 Holocaust testimonials, survivors describing their experiences in the camps, liberators, people in hiding,” Blood said. “In one testimonial a husband and wife were describing their experience together and the wife kept interjecting 'tell them about the dogs, tell them about the dogs.' You just can't transcribe that — you need to hear the audio to experience their story.”