To date I have collected ten oral history interviews with a wide range of people associated with Seaton Delaval Hall, from former residents to National Trust staff and volunteers. Overall, the experience has been positive for both myself and those I have interviewed. I have enjoyed listening to their stories and many have told me after the interview how much they enjoyed the experience. It is important to note I am recording under Newcastle University and not the National Trust. This means I need to follow the university’s ethics and data protection policies. However, during my three-month placement at Seaton Delaval Hall and my efforts to get the recordings archived, I developed a better understanding how recording oral history within the National Trust works.
If you type oral history into Acorn you get “the guide to setting up an oral history project.” Although sadly many of the links to other Trust oral history projects are dead-links, the guide gives a good foundation to recording oral history. The emphasis of working with The British Library and getting training from the Oral History Society which can be paid for by the Sir Laurie Magnus Bursary is great. I have come across many oral history projects where archiving is very much treated as an afterthought, so it is refreshing to see how the guide encourages working with an archivist throughout an oral history project. However, both the guide and the current permissions and copyright assignment form, which is to be used for archiving the recordings at the British Library, are not completely up to date with regards to data protection and the copyright assignment. There is little to no mention of GDPR and the copyright assignment looks a little too simple if compared to what copyright, data protection and licensing experts, Naomi Corn Associates, currently advise.
It is also important to point out that in the guide there is no mention of the ethical issues you need to consider when recording oral history, only a small paragraph on what to do in case the interviewee gets upset. Because I am recording oral histories via Newcastle University I had to go through thorough ethical approval. There is no such process within the National Trust.
Another slightly out of date element is the storing of the oral history recordings before they are archived. The guide focuses on an electronic cascading file system, which is fine. But it does not discuss the devices where these files need to be stored and I am pretty confident that the way the National Trust stores its files has clearly changed since the writing of this guide. I contacted the data protection office and they informed me that an oral history recording and its accompanying metadata needs to be stored on SharePoint for data protection reasons. This seems completely logical, only I was also informed by IT that they would prefer it if people did not have large WAV files on SharePoint because this interferes with the Trust’s carbon neutrality aims. I would also like to note that the archivists I have talked to emphasise that a digital file only exists if it is stored in three different places with at least one of them not being cloud based. There is therefore a slight conflict between data protection and IT, although I was later offered to upload my WAV files to the Seaton Delaval Hall SharePoint, after I mentioned this issue to a member of staff.
In addition to dissecting the Trust’s guide to oral history I have become familiar with the British Library’s cataloguing system – cadensa. It is definitely not the most user-friendly interface and the software company that developed it seems to no longer support cadense, which is slightly worrying. The National Trust audio collection at the British Library is their biggest collection with over 1000 entries but access to these recordings is limited due to the cadensa software. From the contact I have had with the British Library they are aware of their limitations and understand they might not be able to offer the best access to archived recordings. They are after all also working with limited resources.
What I believe I am able to concluded from my experience doing oral history recordings on a National Trust site, is that the foundations are there but they just need updating. By bringing together oral historians, IT support, the data protection office, archivists, and copyright experts one could easily update the guidance to make the process safer and more ethical.