Collections Description

This collection documents the memories of mall shoppers who either have direct experience spending time at Virginia Center Commons Mall, covered the mall on their YouTube channel and shared insights on dead malls, or have shared memories of what it is like to spend time at mall with their family and friends. The audiovisual holdings (audio recordings of oral interviews) and associated transcripts generated from this project were produced between March 2025 and April 2025. While the oral history project was ongoing, Joa Kearney was educated on how to practice oral history in their HIST483 course at Old Dominion University and thus, was trained on how to act as an interviewer.

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The interviews in this collection highlight mall shoppers’ memories of their personal experiences spending time at shopping areas, from the time when they were children to when they are adults, to illustrate the shift in spending habits, highs and lows of malls, perspectives as they grew older, and the way they had fun.

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Content in this collection is entirely digital, captured through Zoom and Google Voice interviews due to preferences of interviewer and interviewee. All recording files were created by Joa Kearney, a student interviewer.

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The collection’s digital holdings were processed and maintained by Joa Kearney. Joa edited audio content and created text-based transcripts. They ensured that the transcripts were approved by the project’s interviewees before submission to their professor of their oral history course and onto this website archive. In the transcriptions, Joa wanted to ensure to keep pauses and how interviewees spoke as accurately as possible because they believe if they were to remove these moments, it loses the meaning of what they say and demeans how they talk. Also, when transcribing the recording, Joa first used the transcript from Zoom Meeting, and then used a Word document to make the official transcript. For each recording with the interviewees, Joa ensured that they [the interviewees] could tell Joa if they wanted to leave something off the record. Joa reminded them of this fact before each start of the recording.