Ethical Editing of Oral Histories: The Experience of the Birmingham Children's Homes Project Archivist

Abstract

This article describes the legal and ethical problems encountered by the Birmingham Children's Homes Project while collecting oral history interviews from former residents and staff of children's homes. The article briefly discusses the background to the project and the wider debate about re-use of data. It then explains the measures considered and undertaken to edit transcripts of the interviews in order to avoid identifying former looked-after children and to remove remarks made by interviewees which could amount to defamation, while retaining enough content and context to make them valuable resources for both general researchers and former residents of children's homes.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Gudrun Limbrick, the oral historian on the Children's Homes Project, who greatly assisted the author in navigating these issues, and thanks Craig Fees and Rachel MacGregor, who kindly read and commented on a draft of this article.

Notes

 [1] These enquiries are dealt with by a team within CYPF, not through BA&H, so a detailed breakdown of figures is not available.

 [2] See, for instance, the website of the Wessex Film and Sound Archive, http://www3.hants.gov.uk/wfsa/wfsa-collections/oral-history.htm (accessed 4 May 2011); and the website of the South Yorkshire Women in Industry project, which invites participants to ‘play an important role in the filling in of gaps about women in the history of industrial work in the region’, http://www.sywol.org.uk/Women_in_Industry_Partici-148.asp (accessed 4 May 2011).

 [3] Fogerty, Filling the Gap: Oral History in the Archives, 148.

 [4] Even where such records as punishment books or food receipts have survived, several of the oral histories contradict the written evidence; one former employee, for instance, stated that her predecessor as housemother had used disciplinary methods which were not recorded in punishment books.

 [5] Although this article addresses only the oral history strand of the project, there were several other important outcomes, including a directory of all Birmingham City Council-run children's homes; photographs of most of the current and former homes which are still in existence; and the collection and cataloguing of a large number of photographs and other records relating to children's homes. Further information is available at www.birmingham.gov.uk/archives and http://www.connectinghistories.org.uk/childrenshomes.asp.

 [6] The original intention had been to publicise the project through the local media, but delays in internal communication within the Council meant that by the time a press release had been approved the project had only a short time left to run.

 [7] See, for example, Ward, ‘Is your oral history legal and ethical?’ Oral History Society website, http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/ethics/index.php (accessed 7/12/2010); Rickard, ‘Oral history: More dangerous than therapy? Interviewees' reflections on recording traumatic or taboo issues’; Jones, ‘Distressing Histories and Unhappy Interviewing’; Hamilton, ‘On Being a Good Interviewer: Empathy, ethics and the politics of oral history’.

 [8] http://www.otherpeopleschildren.org.uk. This project is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and the main strand of the project is collecting oral histories from former residents of therapeutic communities for children. It has many parallels with the Children's Homes Project, particularly in that the children involved often had damaged or chaotic childhoods, and so similar issues around data protection and defamation have arisen.

 [9] Rickard, ‘Oral history: More dangerous than therapy?’, 44.

[10] The legal guidance relating to children's records is not strictly relevant to these kinds of oral history recordings, but the team tried to abide by the principles of fairness and access included in the Data Protection Technical Guidance Note: Subject Access Requests and Social Services Records published by the Office of the Information Commissioner. See also the European Court of Human Rights judgement in the case of Gaskin vs. United Kingdom (1989), http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?action=html&documentId=695368&portal=hbkm&source=externalbydocnumber (accessed 21 April 2011); and the Information Commissioner's Decision Notice FS50314844 (2011), relating to school records held by Powys County Council, http://www.ico.gov.uk/∼/media/documents/decisionnotices/2011/fs_50314844.ashx (accessed 4 May 2011).

[11] The challenges of editing interviews in a theoretical sense apply equally to both recordings and transcripts, but due to practical limitations this project was only able to produce edited transcripts, not edited audio recordings. Audio recordings which are subject to closure periods are therefore inaccessible to researchers in their entirety.

[12] Corti, Editorial.

[13] Till, ‘The Archive in Question’, 15.

[14] Rickard, ‘What are sex worker stories good for? User engagement with archived data’, 92.

[15] Email to the author from Craig Fees, Project Director of ‘Therapeutic Living with Other People's Children’, 9 February 2010.

[16] See IQDA Anonymisation Guidelines, http://www.iqda.ie/sites/default/files/AnonymisationProtocolV5.pdf, accessed 21 April 2011; UK Data Archive guidance on anonymisation, http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/consent-ethics/anonymisation?index=2 (accessed 21 April 2011).

[17] UK Data Archive guidance on anonymisation, http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/consent-ethics/anonymisation?index=2 (accessed 21 April 2011).

[18] All excerpts from interviews used in this article have had names of people and places changed. They are not individually referenced in order to maintain the anonymity of those involved; however, all interviews are catalogued at BA&H with the collection reference number MS 2838.

[19] Email to the author from Craig Fees, 9 February 2010.

[20] Louise Corti, Annette Day and Gill Backhouse, Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives, 11.

[21] Ward, ‘Is your oral history legal and ethical?’

[22] It should be noted that project participants who were former or current staff were asked before their interview to try not to discuss personal details of children in their care, although this proved impossible for most in the flow of conversation. The oral historian explained to participants that the project team reserved the right to edit out such details as they thought appropriate.