RED contains data from 432 different informants (excluding interviewers). The majority of these speakers are NORMs - non-mobile old rural males - who typically grew up before WW I. Most of the material included in FRED stems from Oral History Projects where informants have been interviewed to record their life memories. In order to remedy the linguistic shortcomings of the original Oral History Material, trancripts have been carefully edited, or re-transcribed where necessary, before being included in the corpus.
A few samples can be downloaded but the full version of FRED (2.5 million words) is available to researchers and (visiting) scholars at the University of Freiburg only, due to copyright restrictions.