Practicing Oral History in Historical Organizations by Barbara W. Sommer (review)

In volume four of the Practicing Oral History Series, Barbara W. Sommer offers oral historians and others working with or within museums, historic sites, archives, and other organizations, a long-awaited update to Willa Baum's 1995 edition of Oral History for the Local Historical Society. Practicing Oral History in Historical Organizations is an accessible reference text organized into four parts: "Oral History and the Oral History Life Cycle," "Oral History for Public Audiences," "Oral History: Step by Step," and "Reflections and Resources"; it incorporates examples of project proposals, legal release agreements, and training resources, among other tools used by and gathered from historical organizations across the country.

This reference work is a versatile text that can equally serve both independent practitioners working with repositories and the organizations that collect, preserve, and interpret history for pubic audiences. Its organization is similar to that of the extensive Community Oral History Toolkit (Nancy MacKay, Mary Kay Quinlan, and Barbara W. Sommer [New York: Routledge, 2013]), and thus it could (in some circumstances) serve as a condensed version of that larger work, particularly for community-based projects that choose historic organizations as repositories. The content provides shared scaffolding and a basis for collegiality within this type of mutually beneficial partnership.

Sommer's outline format is particularly helpful for those who provide training and outreach from within historical institutions. The author recognizes this occasional role of trainer by emphasizing training as an important phase within the planning step of the oral history life cycle. The text itself, particularly "Oral History: Step by Step," provides a functional outline for developing oral history overviews and workshops for fellow staff, volunteers, and community members.

Practicing Oral History in Historical Organizations is also well suited to training applications because the author's style—in this as well as in her other solo and collaborative publications—is neither abstruse nor oversimplified. For example, copyright issues and legal concerns can be difficult to discuss and convey to volunteers, narrators, and researchers. Sommer's discussion of copyright and legal release agreements in the dedicated section and throughout the other chapters is practical, sober, and easily understood. It is worth bookmarking and highlighting for those difficult requests that place a nonlawyer in an awkward advisory position.

Another great strength of this text is Sommer's explanation and exemplification of oral histories as being unlike other museum and archival collections; the recordings are unique in that they are created to be preserved as a primary source. They are born historically important instead of achieving that status accidentally through the passage of time and donation. In this sense, Sommer's text has applications for large organizations establishing or revising their unified collections policies to account for the unique position of oral histories among artifacts, manuscripts, and other objects of historic importance. Furthermore, the section discussing preservation and access/use has applications for establishing or revising procedures for archiving oral histories in large GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) institutions that often attempt to treat all items in the same fashion for the sake of streamlined, consistent processes.

With that said, the preservation and access portions of the oral history interview life cycle discussions are ready for a second edition even in the short years since this book's publication in 2015. Only discussed briefly, the proliferation of long-term, cloud-based storage backing up NAS and other server storage has changed the expense and complexity of preserving uncompressed oral history interview files. Concurrently, the fast and ubiquitous adoption of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) has had a significant impact on online accessibility and use. In short, oral histories now move more rapidly through the life cycle from idea to access, with some additional costs and ethical concerns in between.

Perhaps in an updated edition, I would also like to see more information about the myriad other ways historical organizations practice and use oral history beyond Sommer's project-centric model. In this book, the oral history project is...