Place as Seen by Creators: Lessons from a Youth Filmmaker Oral History Project for Local History Collection in Public Libraries

Abstract

Public libraries have long collected local history through material change - urban development, architectural shifts, demographic change - while sensory and embodied dimensions remain largely absent from archives. This paper argues that organizing pre-linguistic, fragmentary sensory experience into narrative is a learned ability—one whose subjective, embodied quality conventional documentation struggles to capture. Oral history provides a lens for examining this process, as it foregrounds how narrators remember and articulate place. Creative communities (filmmakers, artists, writers, etc.) are ideal partners for collecting such memories. Trained to translate non-verbal experiential experience into preservable narrative, creators are not merely inhabitants of place but its interpreters.

Grounded in an oral history project involving in-depth interviews with young Chinese filmmakers from the Vision Youth Awards (2003-2023), the analysis reveals three experiential patterns: sensory echoes of lost spaces, embodied pathways of memory, and affective layering of place memory. These constitute a personal experiential history of place—a dimension almost entirely absent from existing archives.

The paper proposes three strategies for public libraries: expanding collection targets to include local creative communities; enriching metadata frameworks with experiential fields; and establishing collaborative mechanisms with universities, arts institutions, and film festivals to broaden reach and ensure inclusive representation.