The archive-keeping: survey cards, photographs and recorded voices

1975–2015 AND NOVEMBER 2026 · THE COUNTY'S KEEPING, WITH THE TOWN'S OWN

Heritage work is also the keeping of the record itself, and the county's keeping has three instruments, named. First, the survey cards: the Historic Preservation Commission holds the Survey Cards of the Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory fieldwork — the card-by-card record behind art-66-4's surveys, kept as a public research instrument at the commission. Second, the photographs: the commission also holds the Lou Sabo Historic Photograph Collection, the city's photographic memory in organised form. Third, the voices: for South Bend's 150th anniversary in 2015, WVPE-FM and the Kroc Center ran "South Bend Stories," a StoryCorps-modelled oral-history project that recorded residents at a booth at the anniversary celebration of 22–23 May 2015, with the longer versions of the interviews archived at the St. Joseph County Public Library and The History Museum; and the IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center's Oral History Collection — 170-plus interviews on the finding aid — keeps the county's civil-rights memory in the voices of the people who made it. The town's own archive-keeping is printed at its size beside the county's: Osceola's record of itself is Kiracofe's two histories — the 1968 history and the Osceola Historical Society's 1988 History of Osceola (standing want, as assembly already knows: the 1988 volume, Indiana State Library 977.201 S143zok, is registered but was not read first-hand) — and the banked sources fragment's library seats. No pageant, no oral-history programme and no survey-card file for the town appears in any source reached; the town keeps its past in two books, and the article says so rather than dressing the books as a programme.

Sources: Historic Preservation Commission holdings pages (Survey Cards; Lou Sabo Historic Photograph Collection), southbendin.gov, read November 2026; WVPE-FM / Kroc Center "South Bend Stories" project record (2015); IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center oral-history finding aid; banked sources fragment.