Curating Oral Histories

From Interview to Archive

Nancy MacKay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351570305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The interview is completed, the recorder packed away, and you've captured the narrator's voice for posterity. The bulk of your oral history is finished or is it? Nancy MacKay, archivist and oral historian, addresses the crucial issue often overlooked by researchers: How do you ensure that the interview you so carefully recorded will be preserved and available in the future? MacKay goes carefully through the various steps that take place after the interview transcribing, cataloging, preserving, archiving, and making your study accessible to others. Written in a practical, instructive style, MacKay guides readers, step by step, to make the oral historyarchive ready offers planning strategies, and provides links to the most current information in this rapidly evolving field. This book will be of interest to oral historians, librarians, archivists and others who conduct oral history and maintain oral history materials. See more at http://www.nancymackay.net/curating/

CHAPTER 1
SETTING THE STAGE

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We often create artificial distinctions between those who collect, those who research and report on, and those who preserve the record. When these are not the same person, their interests become compartmentalized, and there are too few opportunities to transfer understanding from recording session to future listeners and viewers of the record.… [T]he curator of collections must serve the multiple and diverse interests of narrators, donors, and users.

—William Schneider

William Schneider’s words resonated as I read the responses to my survey. Over and over curators described their frustration in trying to process documents so far removed from the oral historian and her intentions—interviews without labels, summaries, or transcripts, and legal consent forms that were missing or insufficient. The consequences of this disconnect between the creator and the curator bode ill for the very historical record we seek to enrich.

When I started thinking about this book I was dismayed there was no term to aptly describe my topic. I had to search all the way back to 1978, to an essay by Willa Baum¹ calling for a stronger relationship between oral historians and librarians. She discussed curating as an essential library function and one of the “four Cs” in oral history.²

In rereading her essay, I was shocked that the questions Baum raised in the late 1970s are the very questions that plague us today: Who owns the tape? Who can grant permission to reproduce it? How should it be catalogued? Must the cataloger listen to the entire interview to determine the subject headings? Is the library liable if something defamatory is said in the interview?³ Indeed, methodology for curating oral histories sadly lags behind the excellent methodology for collecting them.

CURATING, AN OVERVIEW

Curation refers to the long-term care and management of historical documents, in order to ensure maximum access for the present and the future. It includes the archival process but goes beyond it. Here are some principles of curation as they apply to oral history.

Infrastructure

Oral histories need a physical home and, increasingly, a virtual home. They need an administrator who understands the organizational structure of the holding institution, the physical and intellectual characteristics of oral histories, the technical requirements of preserving them, and the user audience. Since oral histories have special needs and often get buried in the backlog, the curator must advocate on their behalf to funding agencies and policy makers.

Record Keeping

Meticulous record keeping is essential to a well-managed archive. Records include a complete and accurate inventory of holdings; a management system to track processing, cataloging, restrictions, legal papers, and items missing; and a file for proper names and dates, verified and spelled consistently.

Rights Management

Rights management for oral histories includes tracking restrictions, intellectual property rights, and permission to use. These complex issues are specific to each archive, and should be reviewed by administrators and legal experts within the institution.

Cataloging

The primary purpose of cataloging is to direct users to the information they seek, as quickly and precisely as possible. Cataloging can also track administrative information, and provide an inventory. There are several models for cataloging oral histories but currently no standards.

Preservation

The goal of any archive is to preserve its collections into the indefinite future. As we move from an analog to a digital environment, there is much confusion about best preservation practices for oral histories, but currently no standards.

Access

A corollary to preservation is access: archives have a mission to make their holdings available to users. Traditionally, that meant making a transcript and/or recording available in a repository. But modern archival practice calls for a more proactive approach to access, including educational outreach, publications, displays, and online exhibitions.

ORAL HISTORY, AN OVERVIEW

The task and theme of oral history—an art dealing with the individual in social and historical context—is to explore this distance and this bond [between “history” and personal experience], to search out the memories in the private, enclosed space of houses and kitchens and—without violating that space, without cracking the uniqueness of each spore with an arrogant need to scrutinize, to know, to classify—to connect them with “history”—and in turn force history to listen to them.

—Alessandro Portelli⁴

Alessandro Portelli captures the essence of oral history so beautifully. More simply defined, oral history is a method of documenting recent history through the words of those who lived it. Practitioners have refined the definition to include these characteristics to distinguish oral history from journalism, ethnography, or other kinds of interviewing.

Question and Answer Format

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

Respect for the Narrator

An oral history is considered a collaborative work, with the narrator the primary creator. If there is a conflict, the narrator’s wishes should prevail. Generally the interviewer controls the structure of the interview, and the narrator controls its content.

Highest Quality Recording

Since archived interviews will be listened to over and over into the future, interviewers should make recording quality a high priority. Interviewers should use the best recording equipment available to them, and develop the skill to use it proficiently.

Subject Expertise

Interviewers should develop expertise in the subject of the interview and prepare by choosing topics and questions carefully.

Archiving

The completed oral history should be catalogued, copied to preservation media, and deposited into an appropriate archive for permanent storage and access.

Professional Standards

Practitioners have an ethical responsibility to the narrator, to the institution they represent, and to the profession. Oral historians should follow the standards and guidelines issued by the Oral History Association and the American Historical Association.

Within these parameters, oral historians approach interviewing from various perspectives. At one end of the spectrum is the life history interview, which consists of a number of in-depth interviews documenting one person’s life. At the other end is the topical interview, which consists of multiple interviews organized around a topic or event. These interview styles can be combined or adapted to suit the mission of the project at hand. Whatever the approach, it needs to be communicated to the curator, because it will affect decisions in record keeping, cataloging, and preservation.

THE REPOSITORY

The repository is the physical site where oral histories are kept. Libraries and archives are the most traditional repositories for oral histories, but historical societies, museums, schools, community centers, religious institutions, and corporations hold oral histories as well. A repository can be as simple as a closet or a file cabinet in the director’s office, or as large and well-equipped as a presidential library. Each has a different organizational structure, set of goals, and resources. For most, caring for oral histories is only a small part of the mission. Yet curators from every repository must find a way to store, catalog, and preserve oral histories, all within the confines of their institutional mission and resources at hand.

The responses to my survey highlight this diversity: twenty-one came from academic institutions, thirteen from publicly funded historical societies, six from various national government archives (from the U.S., U.K., and Canada), and twenty-one from private and community projects. Two respondents have an online presence only.

WHAT’S SO HARD ABOUT CURATING ORAL HISTORIES?

Oral histories all too often end up in the back room of the repository, unprocessed and forgotten. The archivist discovers the tapes are unlabeled and puts the project aside; the cataloger is confounded by the formats, so she returns the cassette and transcripts to her problem shelf; the curator discovers the legal consent forms don’t meet the requirements for the institution, so she throws in the hat as well. These are just some of the problems that keep oral histories on the margins in archives. Some of the problems are inherent to the nature of oral history and will be addressed throughout the book; others stem from poor communication between the creators and the curators of the materials. Here are some of the obstacles curators face.

Rights Management

This is a complex issue that everyone tends to shy away from, yet it is essential to a properly managed archive. Generally, rights management refers to the bundle of legal transactions associated with accessioning the oral history into the archive, honoring any restrictions attached to it, and managing its use. In real life, oral histories end up in the repository with legal papers missing, inadequate for current standards, or with complicated restrictions. The time and expertise required to remedy inadequate legal papers is enormous and expensive, and sometimes leads to dead ends. Curators must decide whether to allocate precious staff time to do this research. To further complicate things, curators now face new legal issues regarding the posting of interviews on the Internet. The result of these complexities, sadly but understandably, often keeps oral histories from public access.

Orphaned Documents

These are documents in an archive which cannot be made available to the public for some reason—the legal consent form is missing or inadequate; the document itself is too fragile to handle; or in the case of sound recordings, the media format is obsolete and can’t be played. Oral histories are doubly vulnerable to orphan status because of their complicated legal status and because of the obsolescence factor of recording media. Orphaned documents pose a major dilemma for curators, who must weigh the enormous cost in staff resources to rectify the problems ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Setting the Stage
• Chapter 2 Archives Administration
• Chapter 3 Legal & Ethical Issues
• Chapter 4 Recording Technology
• Chapter 5 Transcribing
• Chapter 6 Cataloging
• Chapter 7 Preservation
• Chapter 8 Oral Histories on the Internet
• Chapter 9 Challenges of the 21st Century
• Notes
• Appendix A: Profiles of Oral History Programs
• Appendix B: Forms
• Appendix C: Glossary
• Appendix D: Resources
• Appendix E: Organizations and Professional Associations
• Index
• About the Author