So… The National Trust is not an archive. Every recording is stored at the British Library and you have to pay to get it out; a small fee but still. A fabulous perk of having it stored at the British Library is that the library is a power house and has the money and facilities to keep everything updated and playable. They also have great paperwork, which can be interpreted in multiple ways. The National Trust also does not use this archive. The National Trust podcasters have only recently discovered the existence of the archive, which is a bit awkward.
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.
OHD_WRT_0177 my Experience of oral history at the National trust 27/10/22
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My National Trust supervisor Jo Moody invited me to do a workshop at the National Trust Northern Collections and Interiors Forum in York. The aim was to have an open discussion about oral history and gauge the collection staff’s familiarity with oral history. The participants had various degrees of familiarity with oral history, but once we started discussing the ins-and-outs of conserving and maintaining oral history they had more questions than answers.
Activity One: Oral History Braindump
Aim: To understand the value of oral history to heritage sites.
Task: To start with the participants will be asked to “dump” all the times they have listen to an oral history good or bad. They will then pick out the positive or negative feelings they had while experiencing these oral histories in an effort to understand the value of listening to oral history.
Activity two: Breaking down an oral history recording
Aim: To understand what we need to do to make and keep an oral history recording
Task: First, the participants will be asked to think about is needed to make an oral history recording. Then they will be asked what is necessary to keep an oral history recording.
Activity Three: What are we going to make?
Aim: To come up with ideas for the use of oral history by drawing on the two previous activities
Task: The participants are asked to come up with ideas that best display the value of oral history but also consider the resources, labour and ethics that are involved with handling an oral history.
During the summer of my first year I put every entry in the National Trust sound collection from the British Library’s catalogue into a spreadsheet (OHD_SPS_0161). This strenuous activity revealed several things to me. Firstly, the access people have to the National Trust’s sound collection, which is demonstrated by the title of the report (OHD_RPT_0132) – Play this (at British Library only). I did not find a single recording that I could listen to. Later on when I did my placement at the British Library I found out why this was the case as many recordings did not have the right copyright clearance. At the time of writing the situation is even worse since the British Library was hacked in October 2023 and the Sound and Moving Image Archive has still not returned online.1 The activity also revealed the different approaches each site had to collecting oral history, and highlighted the human mistakes that occur when cataloguing which I explore further in Human fixes.
The different approaches to oral history across the Trust OHD_RPT_0132
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Luckily I was able to do a more thorough audit of the Trust’s collection, as well as listen to some of the recordings, during my placement at the British Library in the late spring of 2023. I audited the uncatalogued material and went through the entire collection to see which recordings had the correct up to date copyright permissions (OHD_COL_0262). The report I had made for both British Library staff and Trust staff is below.
My work at the British Library led to the creation of a three month Post-graduate placement. This placement would be a pilot project with the intern collaborating with the staff at a specified Trust site to develop a workflow that will help Trust sites to obtain the much needed copyright of their recordings or allow the recordings to be registered as orphan works. As I was the person who was the most familiar with the collection, having gone through it entry by entry several times, I was tasked with finding sites that would be a good fit for this collaborative pilot.
OHD_RPT_0263 NT property recommendations for PhD placement
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During my placement I also made a flowchart to depict the various stages of making an oral history accessible within the context of the Trust and the British Library. I had already made a similar flowchart during my placement at Archives at NCBS (OHD_WHB_0248).
Outside of getting an understanding of the copyright right status of the collection and what it takes to make a Trust oral history accessible, I also gain an idea of the contents of the 1700 recordings. I wrote this up in a blog post for the British Library (OHD_WRT_0273). Sadly the blog post was never published because of the hack in October 2023.
The National Trust is one of the biggest landowners and charities in the UK; the number of stories and histories which come under its care are innumerable. And these are exciting and often fundamentally conflicting stories: there is no single story of the National Trust. Recounting the history and significance of the Trust is always a balancing act in which the many layers of history kept by and embodied in the estates needs to be told from different perspectives. A conflict of interest and a struggle for prominence is present in the current collection, but certain questions that are in the public eye today are notably absent. Nobody asks where the money came from, for example. The colonial pasts of these properties appear absent although it would be an interesting research project to comb the archived recordings for references to colonial ties.
In addition to gaining familiarity with how the Trust collects oral history I also investigated how the Trust collects in general. While I was doing my placement at Seaton Delaval Hall I was able to witness the acquisition of an architectural drawing of the mausoleum with its original roof, before it was stolen in one night. My National Trust supervisor showed me the Trust’s Collection Management System (CSM), the acquisition forms, and the Trust’s collection policy. Not a single one of these is built to accommodate the acquisition of intangible or digital heritage, which includes oral history. The policy only discusses “objects” and only objects are allowed to be entered into CSM, under either the collection or the objects which are just part of the site, like chairs for the room guides to sit on. The acquisition forms are primarily focussed on the monetary value of acquired objects.
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This lack of process for acquiring intangible material led me to two things. Firstly I created a collection of design fictions [define design fictions] based around an Intangible and Digital Heritage Consultant. These fictitious meetings, emails, and job adverts became a way for me to explore what it would take to create a collection policy and processes that allow for the acquisition of intangible heritage. I also created some design fictions which addressed the decay, destruction, and deterioration of heritage because of the climate crisis and the decreasing resources. This accumulated in a presentation for higher-up Trust staff where I intended to exhibit a world where there was an Intangible and Digital Heritage Consultant. However, I never presented this fiction as the meeting took a different turn.
OHD_PRS_0185 Design Fiction Presentation to Lucy and Heather 13/10/2022
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The second thing the lack of process for acquiring intangible and/or digital material inspired was a look at what value oral history, both its collection and reuse, can offer the National Trust. Oral history recordings are not likely offer much monetary value, however as I found out while I was recording oral histories for Seaton Delaval Hall and auditing the Trust’s collection, oral history has more to offer than just good stories. This reframing of the value of oral history helped me get more buy-in from Trust staff as it included using recordings as a technique to capture institutional memory, and using recording to make exhibitions more inclusive.
OHD_GRP_0260 Oral history at the National Trust Poster
A look into Oral History at the National Trust
Wednesday 31st Jan 2024
14:00 – 17:00
Online
This workshop is a culmination of three years of research into the past, present, and future of Oral History at the National Trust. It will take you through the stories found in the sound collection of 1700 recordings archived at The British Library, and the experience of recording Oral History on a National Trust site today. It will also offer insight into the opportunities and obstacles of recording future Oral History at the National Trust. The workshop aims to create a discourse around the rich, yet awkward resource of Oral History, how it can enrich the stories told by the National Trust, and the practical side of recording, archiving, and using such a personal artefact.
Hannah James Louwerse is completing her Collaborative Doctoral Award at Newcastle University. Her project is partnered with Seaton Delaval Hall where she has recorded oral histories from the community. She also completed a placement at The British Library auditing the National Trust’s large sound collection.
As part of my final output for the Trust I did a three hour online workshop about Oral history at the National Trust. The workshop was in three sections: past, present, and future. Like many of my interactions with Trust staff and volunteers there were varying levels of familiarity with oral history accompanied by enthusiasm for the topic – although I would note some angst around data protection and oral histories with some participants worrying that the effort to record and manage oral histories ethically is not worth the stress and time.
After the workshop I developed my final two outputs: the status report of oral history at the National Trust (OHD_RPT_0298) and a new guide to oral history (OHD_DSN_0299).
There was part of me that did not want to create a guide to oral history as I felt that like the current Trust oral history guide it will become out of date soon. This is why I briefly toyed with the idea of making something dubbed “the NOT how-to guide”, however I lost access to the file when I no longer had the Adobe Suite2 and I also imagined the title and contents was maybe unnecessarily tongue-in-cheek.
In the end I made sure the advice given in my final guide was open and flexible. I emphasised the importance of networking and collaboration, and overall working towards a wider culture of oral history at the Trust.
It is however important to note this is a guide, not a rule book. As previously mentioned, every situation will be different, so tailor the advice in this guide to fit your own specific situation. If you are interested in incorporating Oral history into a project or integrate it into your collection policy, it is advisable to contact people both inside and outside the National Trust who have experience of using Oral history.
