History may be written by the winners, as the old saying goes, but it can be told by just about anybody.

To prove that, the Friends of the Catonsville Library aims to restart an oral history project begun in the 1970s and ended in the 1980s.

The Friends hope to get the project of interviewing residents, visitors and former residents under way this winter.

Lisa Vicari, a volunteer and coordinator of the Catonsville Room at the library on Frederick Road, plans to start rounding up volunteers for a committee, which will begin meeting in late August or early September.

The goal of the project is to touch on major events as well as bits of history, such as what Frederick Road looked like 60 or 70 years ago, she said.

"There are so many different kinds of things you could be looking for," Vicari said. "There's the event things, like the Catonsville 9, that are obvious.

"But there are things where the topic is driven by the specific person because this person knows about such and such."

Catonsville is an ideal community for recording oral histories since it has both longtime residents and relatively new arrivals, said Vicari, who has lived in Catonsville since 1977.

"There are families who stay here, so they'll have multigenerations of people," she said.

"There is that type of continuity in the community that I think constantly needs to be extended because, of course, the community itself has extended enormously over the years."

Last month, the Friends asked Barry Lanman, director of the Martha Ross Center for Oral History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to advise them on how to start.

He came away impressed with the group's desire to work on the project, he said.

"These people are incredibly committed to preserving Catonsville's history," said Lanman, who lives in Catonsville himself.

"I was so impressed with how knowledgeable they were and how absolutely, truly committed they are."

Vicari hopes Lanman can provide tips on how to locate participants with a variety of interests and how to train the volunteers who will conduct the interviews.

She also hopes to recruit people to operate behind the scenes, either transcribing or archiving interviews.

Lanman, who wrote a book about the history of his native Halethorpe in 2006, said this type of oral history collection is important to get started and to keep going.

"If we don't save it now, this history is going to be lost forever," he said.

Transcripts from the original project can be read in the Catonsville Room, but can't be copied, and the original tapes are sealed, said Vicari.

Agreements to protect participants in the program meant they could delete portions of the transcript and the tapes could never be released, even to family members, Vicari said.

Given the technological advancements since the 1980s, she said she hopes video recordings from the revived oral history project will be made public.

For information about the project, stop by the Catonsville Room on the lower level of the library at 1100 Frederick Road. The room is open Thursdays from 2-5 p.m., the first Wednesday of each month from 7-8:45 p.m. and by appointment.

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