Mike Lawler from the Wisconsin Story Project and Troy Reeves from UW-Madison Oral History Program presented Thursday on their collaborative effort to document stories from the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing tragedy.
They created their project, Campus Voices, to ""capture, present, and preserve some of the strongest historical stories and memories of UW-Madison, through the people who lived them.""
The bombing occurred on August 24, 1970, as a protest to the Vietnam War. It killed one researcher in the building and injured three others.
From August 23 to 29 2010, 97 members of the Madison community recorded their recollections of the catastrophe in a specially constructed video booth located in Memorial Library.
Others who could not come or who were not comfortable being videotaped recorded their stories over voicemail.
Lawler recounted an interview with David Shuster, a South African physics graduate student who was one of the few survivors inside the building during the bombing. Shuster compared his harrowing experience to that of living through the Vietnam War.
""It had been decades with him not talking about it at all, to anybody,"" Lawler said. ""Everything, his entire philosophy of life, was influenced by this one moment.""
According to Reeves and Lawler, the project benefited immensely from extensive media coverage by the Wisconsin State Journal and other local news agencies.
The two men said they have learned the power of collaboration and of preserving and collecting stories through this experience.
In the future, Lawler and Reeves plan to continue collecting interviews about this and other historical events. They also plan to begin a program in the near future called ""Documentary Theater,"" where professional companies would do staged readings of the stories.
