Eastern's first formal oral history program, which received partial funding from a Kentucky Oral History Commission grant, was established by the University Archives in 1976. Shortly thereafter an Oral History Center, under the direction and management of the History department, was created. This collection is primarily composed of over 3,000 interviews and recordings that the Oral History Center assembled from 1977 to 1995. The Oral History Center is no longer open.

The Oral History Center directed a wide variety of projects on such diverse topics as: Kentucky River, Eastern institutional history, Great Depression, Kentucky Prison system, coal mining community life, Appalachian medicine and folklore, Carl D. Perkins, Bert Combs, and Kentucky power elite. The tapes have not been cataloged and do not appear in the library OPAC. To facilitate access to information within the interviews, almost all of them have been indexed using the tape counter of the tape recorder. The list which follows is organized alphabetically into three sections [A - F, G - M, and N - Z] by the last name of the interviewee or event of recording, tape accession number, and name of project.