IICT, Tropical Scientific Research Institute, is the former Portuguese Board for Overseas Researches (1936-1973) that was responsible for science in and about the Portuguese Empire. IICT has several scientific collections gathered during scientific missions to the Portuguese colonies.

The IICT project «Scientific heritage: collections and memories» aims at creating an archive of interview for the study and disclosure of Portuguese «colonial science», from its protagonists’ personal perspective. The project team includes an historian of Portuguese imperialism, Cláudia Castelo, the project's coordinator, who does also the background research, and prepares and conducts the interviews; Rogério Abreu, an Anthropologist responsible for videotaping and editing the interviews; and Marta Costa, an Anthropologist, that catalogues the interviews, does the abstracts and indexation. Edited excerpts of the audio and video records and the transcripts will be available online at ACTD – Tropical knowledge digital repository (http://actd.iict.pt/), created and developed by Yuri Binev. The complete interviews will be available on-site at IICT.

Between late 2009 and 2012 the project's team has done 30 in-depth interviews with scientists and technicians who have done fieldwork in the Portuguese colonies, in several areas of study – Agriculture Sciences, Botany, Geodesy, Geography, Geology, Political sciences, Social Anthropology, and Zoology.

My communication presents this oral history project, discuss the difficulties and challenges of interviewing scientific and technical experts that developed research in and about the Portuguese Empire and point out some historical themes which have emerged from the interviews, including those about which that the interviewer did not ask, revealing the unpredictability of the oral history

The ‘life story’ nature of the interviews allows that the interviewees to talk about several aspects of their life: family and social origins, career, leisure, networks, etc. Topics outside the central themes – «colonial science», scientific missions to the colonies, scientific collections – emerge during the interviews, such as the interviewees perceptions about Estado Novo dictatorship, colonial situation, colonial wars and decolonisation. The oral records that our project is creating will provide a resource for historians of science and imperialism, but also for other researchers with interests that have nothing to do with «colonial science».