Creating an Oral History Archive: Digital Opportunities and Ethical Issues

Abstract

The delivery of primary sources—including oral history interviews—through searchable, online systems has revolutionised historical research over recent years. While the use of such digital technologies creates new opportunities, which can fundamentally change how historians interpret sources and how readers interact with those interpretations, it also adds complexities to existing ethical issues and creates new dilemmas for researchers, collection managers and archivists to consider. In this article, we explore the opportunities and ethical challenges of creating, delivering and archiving a large-scale oral history collection in an online digital environment by using the Australian Generations Oral History Project as a case study.

Notes

1 Linda Shopes, ‘Legal and Ethical Issues in Oral History’, in History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology, eds Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007), 126 and 165.

2 See Oral History Australia, ‘Guidelines of Ethical Practice', www.oralhistoryaustralia.org.au/page/guidelines_of_ethical_practice.html (accessed 27 April 2015); Oral History Society, ‘Is Your Oral History Legal and Ethical?’ www.ohs.org.uk/ethics.php (accessed 27 April 2015); Oral History Association, ‘Principles and Best Practice’, www.oralhistory.org/about/principles-and-practices/ (accessed 27 April 2015).

3 Douglas A. Boyd, ‘“I Just Want to Click on It to Listen”: Oral History Archives, Orality, and Usability', in Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access and Engagement, eds Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 95.

4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).

5 Marshall McLuhan, ‘Visual and Acoustic Space', in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, eds Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004).

6 Greg Goodale, Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 4.

7 Ibid., 2.

8 David Foster and National Library of Australia, Self Portraits, Selected and Introduced by David Foster (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1991). http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/125721/20110309-0001/www.nla.gov.au/pub/ebooks/pdf/self+portraits.pdf (accessed 1 March 2015).

9 Ibid.

10 Anne Karpf, The Human Voice: The Story of a Remarkable Talent (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 4–11.

11 Ibid.

12 Linda Shopes, ‘Editing Oral History for Publication', Oral History Forum d'histoire orale 31 (2011). www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/article/view/385 (accessed 1 March 2015).

13 For example, David Cooper, interviewed by Alistair Thomson, Melbourne, Victoria, 12 and 14 March 2013, TRC6300/160, at http://nla.gov.au/nla.oh-vn6290926.

14 Cooper interview, session 2, 00:20:45, at www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6290926/1-1245~1-1368.

15 See OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer), a web-based system created by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, at www.oralhistoryonline.org (accessed 27 April 2015). Also see the essays about Disseminating on the Oral History in the Digital Age website, at http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/ (accessed 27 April 2015).

16 The METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation. www.loc.gov/standards/mets/

17 The NLA made these packages by developing an export tool that created extracted data from the digital collection management system, the timed summary service, and the audio delivery system, and presented a METS wrapper containing the audio and summary. This package can be recognised and acted on by an HTML 5 compliant Chrome browser on a local computer. This is a technical limitation of the implementation of HTML 5 by browser software, which will be addressed in time by all browsers.

18 Zotero (www.zotero.org/) is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.

19 Alexander Freund, ‘Oral History as Process-Generated Data’, Historical Social Research 34, no. 1 (2009): 22–48; Malin Thor Tureby, ‘To Hear with the Collection: The Contextualisation and Recontextualisation of Archived Interviews’, Oral History 41, no. 2 (Autumn 2013): 63–74; April Gallwey, ‘The Rewards of Using Archived Oral Histories in Research: The Case of the Millennium Memory Bank’, Oral History 41, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 37–50.

20 Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J. and Michael J. Meyer, ‘Thinking Ethically: A Framework for Moral Decision Making’, Issues in Ethics 7, no. 1 (Winter 1996). www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/thinking.html (accessed 27 April 2015).

21 The NLA only claims copyright in the recording of that particular oral narrative, not the intellectual property of the interviewee's story.

22 Kimberly Christen, ‘Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness’, International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 2870–93, quoted extract from 2873. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1618/828 (accessed 10 September 2015).

23 Shopes, ‘Legal and Ethical Issues in Oral History’.

24 Mary Larson, ‘Steering Clear of the Rocks: A Look at the Current State of Oral History Ethics in the Digital Age', Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 36–49.

25 Ibid., 36.

26 Elise Chenier, ‘Privacy Anxieties: Ethics versus Activism in Archiving Lesbian Oral History Practice’, Radical History Review 122 (May 2015): 129–41, quoted extract from 129.

27 Ibid.

28 For details about the recent Boston College case, see: http://chronicle.com/article/Secrets-from-Belfast/144059/ (accessed 4 May 2015). For the Oral History Association's response to the case, see: www.oralhistory.org/2014/05/05/oral-history-association-response-to-developments-in-boston-college-case/ (accessed 4 May 2015).

29 See Alexander Freund, ‘“Confessing Animals”: Towards a Longue Durée History of the Oral History Interview’, Oral History Review 41, no. 1 (2014): 1–26.

30 Closed interview, b. 1959.

31 Australian Council of Professional Historians Associations, ‘Code of Ethics and Professional Standards for Professional Historians in Australia’, 22 August 2006. www.historians.org.au/acpha/bm~doc/code-2.pdf (accessed 27 April 2015); Australian Historical Association, ‘Australian Historical Association Code of Conduct', 2 December 2010. www.concernedhistorians.org/content_files/file/ET/190.pdf (accessed 27 April 2015). See note 2 for Oral History Australia, ‘Guidelines of Ethical Practice’.

32 American Historical Association, ‘Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct’, 2011. http://historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/statements-and-standards-of-the-profession/statement-on-standards-of-professional-conduct#Scholarship (accessed 27 April 2015).

33 Suzannah Lipscomb, ‘A Code of Conduct for Historians’, History Today, 3 December 2014. www.historytoday.com/suzannah-lipscomb/code-conduct-historians (accessed 27 April 2015).

34 Monica Eileen Patterson, ‘The Ethical Murk of Using Testimony in Oral Historical Research in South Africa’, in Oral History Off the Record: Towards an Ethnography of Practice, eds Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 201–18, quoted extract from 202.

35 Ten Hindsight programs using Australian Generations interview material can be accessed at

http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/australian-generations/category/radio/.

36 Alistair Thomson, ‘Australian Generations? Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (March 2016); Katie Holmes, ‘Talking about Mental Illness: Life Histories and Mental Health in Modern Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (March 2016).

37 Christina Twomey and Jodie Boyd, ‘Class, Social Equity and Higher Education in Postwar Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (March 2016).

38 Kerreen Reiger, ‘Telling Families and Locating Identity: Narratives of Late Modern Life’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (March 2016).

39 Australian Generations Oral History Project feedback form from interviewee b. 1934.