Museum of the Person was born in Brazil, São Paulo, in 1991, created by a group of historians who decided to build the country’s history using testimonials of ordinary people. This is a still alive project accessible at http://www.museudapessoa.net. Museum of the Person aims at gathering testimonials from every human being, famous or anonymous, to perpetuate his history.

From the life stories of individuals, the objective is to write up the stories of families, communities, or institutions. This museum deals with common people, humam beings, not with the physical objects usually composing the traditional museum assets.Its “art collection” is made up of intangible or immaterial things.

In this case, the alive objects are used as informers, reporting the events and emotions they experienced. Actually, the narrators, to report their life stories during a predefined structured interview (tape or a film), remember events and other particular situations they have participated in. These memories will act as a basic element for social research, because the set of life stories allows to reconstruct a social universe.

The workflow adopted by MP technicians to acquire common people life stories is expressed below:

1. the report of a participant is recorded (audio or video) by an interviewer. Although every interview is a unique thing, interviewers guide to some predefined topics in order to cover the entire life story;
2. interviews are transcribed;
3. transcriptions are annotated in eXtensible Markup Language, marking events, self contained stories, etc.;
4. XML interviews may be used to produce several outputs.

Life stories are evidences in support of facts or statements attested by common people carrying a social and historical character, which must be preserved and processed to become an immeasurable human heritage.