Oral History’s Design: A creative collaboration. Maintaining and reusing oral history recordings: The National Trust’s Seaton Delaval Hall case study

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Abstract

The maintenance of oral histories, specifically maintaining access to archived oral histories, has largely been overlooked as a method to improve their reuse and, while digital technologies have facilitated wider access to oral histories, the complexities of sustaining such access over time has been underestimated within the oral history community. My study reframes maintaining access as foundational to the secondary use of oral histories and frames it as a ‘wicked problem’ – a design term meaning a multifaceted dynamic problem with no definitive solution. Through this critical commentary and my portfolio of practice I explore how to design and update structures to enable long-term access by focussing on maintenance, using the case study of the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall. My design-led practice consisted of an action research strategy where I shared explanatory and exploratory design artefacts with the staff and volunteers at Seaton Delaval Hall, the wider National Trust, the British Library, and Archives at National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangaluru to gain continuous feedback on my conception of the ‘wicked problem’ and the opportunities for positive intervention. This iterative journey revealed maintaining access to oral histories in a world of rapid technological and societal change is a complicated and deeply undervalued enterprise. My concluding outputs emphasise how maintaining access to oral histories will always be ‘wicked’, and accepting this when designing or updating a structure to access oral histories will encourage the development of a space within the structure for those working within to reflexively react to change.

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