Curating Oral Histories

From Interview to Archive

Nancy MacKay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315430799
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

For the past ten years, Nancy MacKay's Curating Oral Histories (2006) has been the one-stop shop for librarians, curators, program administrators, and project managers who are involved in turning an oral history interview into a primary research document, available for use in a repository. In this new and greatly expanded edition, MacKay uses the life cycle model to map out an expanded concept of curation, beginning with planning an oral history project and ending with access and use. The book: -guides readers, step by step, on how to make the oral history "archive ready";-offers strategies for archiving, preserving, and presenting interviews in a digital environment;-includes comprehensive updates on technology, legal and ethical issues, oral history on the Internet, cataloging, copyright, and backlogs.

Chapter 1

CURATING ORAL HISTORIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Every morning when I turn on the computer, I begin my workday by browsing the news items about oral history that Google Alerts has found for me. The Google spiders do not make judgment about what is considered “good” oral history or “real” oral history; they simply index the term as it appears on a web page. This way, I find out what people in the English-speaking world call oral history, and what other Google users find when searching for oral history. Here are some examples:

• Tales of Glamour and Excess: An Oral History of Back to the Basics

• Aboriginal Oral History Evidence and Canadian Law

• Dakota Oral History Project Reunites Veterans Who Served in Combat

• The Beatles’ first U.S. concert: An Oral History of the Day the Fab Four Conquered DC

• Depression Oral History: Washington University Unveils 100-Plus Hours of Digitized Conversation about the Depression

• Power and Privilege in Oral History Interviews and Projects

I discover that people all over the world are talking about oral history, learning about oral history, and conducting oral history interviews. In so doing, they are participating in an activity which, until recently, has been considered the realm of academics and libraries.

In the decade since the first edition of Curating was published, the term oral history has emerged from the towers of academia and come into our streets and homes. The average person now knows about oral history one way or another, perhaps through the popular StoryCorps project, a memory collecting day at a local library, a classroom oral history project, or a documentary based on interviews. Many of them will tell you proudly that they, too, have conducted oral history interviews.

The explosion of oral history to the general public is redefining the field. Teachers, students, filmmakers, genealogists, storytellers, and community activists are putting their mark on a practice that has been relegated to historians until recently. This expansion of practitioners has implications not only for the practice of oral history, but also for its care and use. As elementary school students interview grandparents and memory banks invite online submissions commemorating a natural event, curators must ask, What, exactly, is oral history? Which leads to more practical questions, such as: Does this resource belong in a repository? Does it belong in my repository? Do we have the resources to properly care for it? How can we best care for it? What will be its value ten, fifty, or even a hundred years from now?

Doug Boyd, Director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, addresses these questions in his 2012 essay, “The Digital Mortgage.” He suggests a holistic approach, in which curation begins as the first step in the oral history life cycle.

From the moment an interviewer presses the record button on an audio or video recorder, the interviewer becomes the curator or caretaker of a precious and fragile unique item. Ideally, at the moment of creation, the digital file has begun its journey from the interview context to a stable archival repository ready to ingest the digital file into a sophisticated digital preservation system. However, many interviews are created without the person responsible for the oral history first making arrangements to preserve and access it. That is not a good practice…. In a digital context, from the moment of creation, you are also preserving it, and of course, you will need to access it. Whatever “digital asset” you are creating must be curated with long-term sustainability as a major priority.¹

This holistic approach is the best-practice model that I follow throughout this book, though I step back even further to suggest that curation begins, not at the point of the interview, but at the point of conception, when the project is planned.

Curators also find increased demand for access to oral histories. The internet has created the expectation for immediate access to all information at any time from any place in the world, without context and without mediation. Most of the time, access is a good thing, since the purpose of curating oral histories is to share them. But the consequences for personal narratives of such an open-door policy is not clear. Issues of privacy, ownership, context, and even safety of the narrator will be actively debated for some time.

Curators face both challenges and opportunities as the guardians of culture in a time of shrinking resources and vanishing cultures. Oral histories present curatorial challenges regarding acquisitions, processing, access, and re-use. In many cases there are no rules, or if there are, oral histories are so idiosyncratic that rules are only guidelines.

What Curators Need to Know

The field of oral history has grown, evolved, gone off on tangents, and then cycled back, but the one element that has not changed is the recorded interview as an anchor point for providing a personal account of a historical time, place, or event. Curators need to understand the importance of the interview as a primary document and the methodology that surrounds it, especially the collaborative relationship between the interviewer and the narrator, the importance of the interview within a context, and the role of recording technology.

About Oral History

Most oral historians would bristle at a definition of oral history based on the Google search engine mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, but that doesn’t mean they have a good alternative. There are almost as many definitions of oral history as there are oral historians. I have found the following definition to work for me, and it is what I will use throughout the book:

Oral history is a method for documenting recent history through recorded personal accounts of those who lived it. It includes the following components:

• Question and Answer Format. Narratives are collected in an interview format with the interviewer asking questions and the narrator responding.

• Shared Authority. An oral history is a jointly created work, with the narrator the primary creator. The narrator may participate in planning the interview, and has the right to review and approve the completed oral history before it is made available to the public.

• Recorded Interviews. Interviews must be audio- or video-recorded in order to preserve the content and the speakers’ voices for future use.

• Subject Expertise. Interviewers should develop expertise in the subject of the interview and prepare topics and questions carefully.

• Context. Oral historians believe the value of an interview increases within a historical, social, or cultural context. Curators must make an effort to preserve the context within which the interview was conducted. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, such as a timeline or essay to accompany the interview; a list of names, places, and events, along with an explanation of their significance; or simply presenting a group of related interviews to the user.

• Ownership. Narrators hold copyright to their words until those rights are transferred to another person or institution through a legal document. Narrators must be informed of the intended use of the interview and be allowed to place restrictions on some or all of the content.

• Archiving. The completed oral history should be deposited in an appropriate repository for long-term care and access. The repository is responsible for cataloging, preservation, and a level of access appropriate to the interview and its context.

• Professional Standards. Practitioners have an ethical responsibility to t...