Fonds PMA - Public Memory Archive

The Public Memory Archive was developed from the Oral History Centre and archive which was founded in 1999 by the Department of History at the University of Malta. Included are all recorded interviews created by researchers (Maltese and foreign) and students at the university, from 1999 to the present day. This project gave preference to the recording of “recollections by working men and women, functional illiterates and members of minorities and subcultures whose voices and material culture have been ignored,” thus bringing the common labouring people to the centre stage of historical inquiry.

The Public Memory Archive contains oral history interviews; fieldwork notes; photographs and ephemera relating to different themes concerning 20th-century Maltese history. Carried out by students and researchers at the University of Malta, the material corresponds with the following themes: women's memories of childbirth; natural and herbal medicine; health and hygiene; reminiscences of the fisherfolk’s survival at sea; recollections of a generation of “factory girls”; nursing and caring at home and in the neighbourhood; survival strategies of the labouring poor; provisions and care of the body; shelter, nutrition and survival during war. The team assigned to the MEMORJA project, at the National Archives of Malta, is responsible for the conversion of this material from analogue to digital format. This is for long-term preservation and access, which involves recording appropriate descriptive, structural and administrative (including technical) metadata.

PMA is divided into sub-fonds according to the name of each interviewee. The quantity of sub-fonds will increase over time as new interviews are conducted. Each series within a sub-fonds reflects a different record type:
Series 01: Interview [sound and video recordings (wave, mp3, MXF and MP4); transcript/s; written accounts (PDF)]
Series 02: Photographic material [analogue and digital i.e. TIFF and JPEG]
Series 03: Ephemera [original and digital surrogates i.e. PDF]
Series 04: Correspondence [PDF]