There is no stable presence of oral history at the National Trust. The Trust’s relationship with oral history can be considered an inconsistent situation created by people who have worked at the Trust over the last few decades having a particular interest in oral history. I witness this fragmented circumstance in three different aspects of the Trust: the oral history advice, the staff’s attitude, and the archive of oral history. In this section I will go through each aspect and then explain how these observations in combination with my experience recording oral history at Seaton Delaval Hall created two outputs: a guide and a report.
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
Below is a flowchart I made during my placement at the British Library. My placement at the Library was my final placement and so by the time I created this flowchart I had already gained a lot of experience and knowledge.1 The flowchart depicts the various stages of making an oral history accessible within the context of the Trust and the British Library. If I compare this flowchart to the Trust’s internal oral history guide then there are clearly certain sections of the process that are not touched upon, such as interim storage, sensitivity checks, or what steps to follow if an old recording is found.2 Clear up-to-date information on an oral history process or what is involved when handling oral history is not currently available to Trust staff and volunteers.
The contents page of the Trust’s old oral history guide
My Trust supervisor Jo Moody invited me to do a workshop at the National Trust Northern Collections and Interiors Forum in York.3 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.
Where the Trust’s inconsistent relationship with oral history is most evident is the Trust’s sound collection. This collection includes all the Trust’s oral histories and is housed at the British Library. 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.4 It revealed the many different oral history projects that had taken place, the different scopes of these projects, and the differing level of organisation. The latter of which was reflected in the various indexing styles.
The different approaches to oral history across the Trust OHD_RPT_0132
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.5
My work at the British Library led to the creation of a three month Post-graduate placement.6 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
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.
This audit and the subsequent internship unveiled how not only is there no consistent approach to oral history across the Trust, but little to no energy is given to maintain access to these recordings once archived, which renders certain project outputs unusable. This is also not a surprising outcome as who is responsible for maintaining these oral histories is not explicitly clear. The Trust handed over their collection but arguably the collection is incomplete due to the missing copyright, which can realistically only be obtained by Trust staff and volunteers, since they are the ones closest to the communities the recordings were taken from. There is also an assumption that the Library has the capacity to look after all these recordings.7 Which if we consider that at the time of writing the Library is not in the best state as it was hacked in October 2023 and the Sound and Moving Image Archive has still not returned online.8 Even before the cyber attack the public did not have access to the Trust’s sound collection, hence the title of my initial report – Play this (at British Library only).9
All of the disjointedness illustrated above is likely the result of the Trust not officially collecting oral history. 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. 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.10 The acquisition forms are primarily focussed on the monetary value of acquired objects.
The Trust is in an odd situation as it simultaneously has one of the largest oral history collections in the country and also does not have any collection policy dedicated to the collection of oral history. I saw this as an opportunity, because after completing my placement at the British Library I probably was one of, if not the most, familiar with the collection, meaning I was best positioned to explain the value of oral history to the Trust. I wrote this in a blog post for the British Library, which sadly was never published because of the cyberattack in October 2023.11 And I also presented a poster at the National Trust Postgraduate research day 12th June 2023.12
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.
OHD_GRP_0260 Oral history at the National Trust Poster
I brought all of my ideas, knowledge, and experience in a three hour online workshop about oral history at the National Trust. The workshop was in three sections: past, present, and future, and was open to the Trust staff and volunteers. 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 there was some anxiety 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. The workshop was an opportunity to present my findings and ideas to my stakeholders one more time before creating my final outputs.
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.
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 Suite15 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.
