Welcome to the Rikers Public Memory Project Online Archive! Here, you can explore community conversations and interviews by people who have been directly impacted by Rikers Island. This content is organized to make it easy for you to browse the entire catalogue of oral history interviews, search for specific people or terms, and learn more about Rikers Island by exploring collections of content organized around specific themes, like Covid at Rikers or Solitary Confinement.
ITEMS
Everything we add to the Rikers Public Memory Online Archive is saved as an “item.” An item can be an oral history interview, a community conversation, or even a piece of digital storytelling, like a video about a certain theme. Items each have a page, which shows you all the information we have made public about that item, and provides access to the item—whether that is through embedded audio or video, or a link to view a transcript. You can read a short description of the item, which will tell you what it is about, themes it may cover, etc.
Image: an item page shows the description of the item--in this case, an interview, and the embedded audio you can listen to.
If you decide you want to share an item, be sure to let everyone know it came from RPMP by including the citation info anywhere you post it—that way, more people can visit our collection and learn about Rikers Island.
Image: An example of a citation that we ask you to use any time you share an item from our archive.
TAGS
Each item is “tagged” with keywords that tell you more about what that content is about. For example, if an interview includes someone talking about their experience of visiting loved ones who were incarcerated at Rikers, that item would be tagged “Visitation Process.” You can click on a tag and see every interview that talks about the visitation process. Tags are a great way to explore content about specific topics that interest you.
Image: On our homepage, you can view popular tags. The bigger a tag appears, the more items are tagged with that keyword!
SEARCH
Image: Advanced Story Search
To search the materials, find the search button in the top right hand corner of the site or in the website’s footer. You can immediately do a simple search, which might uncover exactly what you are looking for—especially if you are looking for a specific item by name! However, you can also do an “Advanced Story Search” or a “Sitewide Search.” “Advanced Story Search” brings additional options for searching the metadata—all the information about each item that is available on item pages—even letting you exclude certain keywords. Advanced Story Search is helpful if you are trying to research a particular topic and want to have more control over the search terms in order to explore the archive’s contents.
“Sitewide Search” allows you to include collections and files in your search. A search for “Solitary Confinement” for example, brings up the Solitary Confinement at Rikers collection, as well as all items that mention solitary confinement in their metadata. With the Sitewide Search, You can check what time of content you are looking for, so if you are only interested in searching collections, simple make sure that “items” and “files” are unchecked.
Image: Sitewide Search