Oral Histories
Oral histories including both audio and audiovisual (video and sound), and their accompanying transcripts and/or time-pointed summaries.
Museum and Gallery Community Archives Sound and Vision
Examples
Examples are wide ranging but can generally include born-digital or digitized material produced as an output of oral history projects; video or oral histories; transcripts, summaries, and other accompanying materials
Hazards
Poor documentation; external dependencies; storage on old or degrading media; storage on consumer portable media; lack of preservation planning; lack of sustained funding; lack of ongoing investment in changing preservation requirements; lack of capability; poor documentation; dependence on small staff or volunteer resources; lack of standardized file naming; uncertainty over IPR or the presence of orphaned works
Sensitive DataMitigations
Preservation capability; high quality storage; meticulous and consistent replication; stored in a trusted repository; preservation requirement understood; intellectual property managed to enable preservation; good descriptive cataloguing; persistent identifiers
Bit List History
Added to list: 2023Last Review
2023 Review
This entry was added in 2019 under ‘Digital Materials in Museums and Galleries’ and previously rescoped in 2021 to ‘Supporting Digital Materials for Museums and Galleries’.
The 2023 Bit List Council superseded the entry, splitting it into six more discrete entries as the scope of the single entry was too broad to provide the guidance needed. The recommendation to break this entry down was also made by the 2021 Jury, as the types of digital collections content in museums can be vast and offer particular risks in museum and gallery contexts. Approaches to preservation are dependent on whether these oral history recordings are on analogue and digital portable media (e.g., external hard disk drives, audio or video tapes), or are in a somewhat managed networked environment. If held on portable media, guidance for portable media should be followed. They agreed with the 2021 Jury Review recommendations that Museum & Gallery entries require further rescoping. In regards to this entry, the 2023 Council recommended a review and rescope of Oral Histories and Research Materials and Outputs due to overlaps/cross referencing which, due to time constraints, was unable to be done for the 2023 review cycle.
2024 Interim Review
The 2024 Council identified a trend towards even greater risk, in light of increased Imminence of Action from five years to less than three years and given the context of Deadline 2025, for museums and galleries that have oral history recordings on physical media (tapes, reels etc.). It is critical that museums take their Oral History collections seriously and put in place plans for digitisation.
The Council recommend that in 2025, the full review considers whether in light of Deadline 2025, if the museums and galleries have not started (or who have made minimal progress towards) digitising audiovisual recordings (and whether the balance between oral histories as born-digital and those remaining on physical format carriers justifies this) if the classification might be raised to Critically Endangered.
They also note how have discovered over the past year that there are a lot more audiovisual recordings that while they have been referred to as oral histories, do not quite fit the format of an oral history recording, and are instead better classified as an interview. With this in mind, they recommend that the 2025 review consider a possible cross-category review with Research Outputs, and whether scope could slightly change to ‘Oral Histories and Audiovisual Interviews’ or something that is more inclusive.
Additional Information
There may be a need for clarifying what falls under oral histories in the context of preservation at the organization - whether it includes audio and/or video recordings recorded for the purposes of creating oral history recordings (to be added to an organization’s collection), or for internal-only use. In addition, there may be some misidentification of oral history recordings, where the intent may have been to capture the recording as a research interview or as vox pops.Case Studies & Examples
- ‘Deadline 2025: collections at risk’ is the international consensus among audiovisual archives that the contents of magnetic audio and video tapes are at high risk of being lost forever due to not only the deterioration of magnetic tapes but also the obsolescence of machines, and parts, to play them. See Deadline 2025: collections at risk, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia [accessed at 2024-09-04].
- Recording remote Oral History interviews, Oral History NSW [accessed at 2023-10-24].
- Remote oral history interviewing, Morgan, C. Perks, R., Stewart, M. and Johnston, C. (2021), Oral History Society. [accessed at 2023-10-24].