- Guest Editor’s Introduction
This special issue of the Oral History Review builds on and extends the work of the Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA) Project. That project began with a grant proposal to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the National Leadership Grants category. The original intent of OHDA was, essentially, to articulate best practices for oral history in the digital age, emphasizing the collecting, curating, and disseminating phases of the oral history trajectory, with a specific focus on technologies, intellectual property, and digital video. The original project proposal was submitted by MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters & Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University, in partnership with the Oral History Association, the American Folklore Society, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and, later, the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries. The IMLS approved the grant proposal, and I was contracted to manage the project.
Within the opening minutes of our first meeting in Washington DC on November 3, 2010, project leaders re-envisioned and redesigned the project. We quickly realized that the impact of digital technologies on the varied phases of the oral history process—collecting, curating, and disseminating—featured numerous points of intersection and overlap and could not be addressed in isolation. Moreover, practitioners come to oral history from vastly different backgrounds, with differing expectations, intentions, and outcomes for the oral history process. Project leaders acknowledged the challenges inherent in designing a “best practices” project for an audience with such diverse needs, especially when “best practices” recommendations often have a relatively short shelf life in the digital age. Thus, we sought a dynamic, nimble, and multidimensional alternative for presenting, considering, discussing, and revising best practices in a way that both informed and empowered knowledge seekers. We wanted to avoid publishing a static and prescriptive document that would require another grant in five years, simply to keep up to date.
Two years later, the OHDA Project redefines the model for best practices in oral history. The project website (http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu) creates an ongoing space that is both comprehensive and dynamic. The OHDA information resource contains a portal to over two hundred best practices documents; a glossary of over two hundred terms pertaining to digital audio, video, and [End Page i] archives; a model tool for automating informed decision-making on choosing digital recorders; as well as the “Thinking Big” video series that features video interviews with numerous leaders in the field. Central to the project are over seventy articles written by experts both inside and outside of the oral history community. Article topics are as varied as automatic speech recognition, choosing a video camera, designing and managing projects, creating a podcast series, text-mining, transcription, digitization, indexing, metadata, usability, collection and content management systems and digital preservation.1 Among the authors of this powerful corpus of online, open-access articles are historians, librarians, archivists, information scientists, museum directors, folklorists, audio and video specialists, administrators, curators, documentary filmmakers, radio producers, web designers, community and academic scholars, teachers and students, an attorney, and a judge.2
This special issue of the Oral History Review is the logical extension of the OHDA Project, and the articles published here engage the central issues facing oral history in the digital age in a scholarly context. A few of the articles originally appeared on the OHDA website, and these have been revised and expanded for this issue. The majority of the articles, however, were written specifically for this publication. I intentionally chose these articles to represent various aspects of the OHDA mission, as well as to reflect on the directions, successes, and future challenges of the project.
Central to the practice of oral history in the digital age is the notion that there is no prescription for the perfect project. Every question about current best practices can be addressed with the wholly unsatisfying answer “it depends.” OHDA authors, whether for the website or for this special issue, were all guided by the underlying principle that oral history is implemented in a variety of contexts, by practitioners...