Action research, controversially in relation to other social sciences, ‘consists largely of case studies.’1 This section of the portfolio presents the case study at the centre of my PhD. This case study started with Seaton Delaval Hall but extended to include oral history at the National Trust as a whole. As it is a case study the particulars of the situation will not apply to every version of the wicked problem of maintaining access to oral history, however it does demonstrate a particular method of working with oral history, which can be utilised by others.

I decided to split the case study into National Trust related material and Seaton Delaval Hall material to show the wicked problem on different scales. The National Trust offered a more top-down view of the situation, requiring me to consider how to manage the issue of maintaining access to oral history across a wide variety of similar but still different scenarios. The Hall offered a view from ground-level and gave me the opportunity to observe the issue of maintaining access to oral history up close. 

When I combined and contrasted these two bodies of experience and knowledge, it revealed a tension between formalised standards set by the Trust and the need for a more flexible DIY approach that is required at site level. I used this observation when creating both final outputs for the Trust and the Hall.

National Trust

This Trust focussed section considers the (lack of) collection policy, the current advice given to those who wish to run an oral history project, and the existing collection of National Trust oral history recordings which is housed at the British Library.

Seaton Delaval Hall

This section looks at the work I did with the staff and volunteers at Seaton Delaval Hall. The Hall is relatively new to the National Trust family and therefore is a blank slate for designing, especially because there were no oral history recordings related to the site until my project.2 This part of the case study also contains the design work I did for the Research Room at the Hall.

  1. Robert Sommer, and Berbara Baker Sommer, A Practical Guide to Behavioral Research : Tools and Techniques. 5th ed., (New York , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 215. ↩︎
  2. I did find one recording on the Hall’s SharePoint which the majority of the staff were unaware of because it was recorded ten years ago. ↩︎