Oral Histories: Conducting Them and Preserving Them

Do you have a shelf of recorded oral histories in your Historical Society?  Would you like to know how to create an oral history project for your family? For your town? For your school?  Do you want to know how to preserve the tapes that contain that oral history? Then “Oral Histories: Conducting Them and Preserving Them” is for you!

It is not easy to conduct oral history interviews that will provide useful information in the future.  Good preparation and knowledge about interviewing techniques are necessary to assure high quality results.

Third in a series of Symposia, “Oral Histories: Conducting Them and Preserving Them” will take place on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 at the Cosmopolitan Club, 122 E 66th Street.

Mary Marshall Clark, an expert in this field and the Director of The Columbia University Oral History Research Office, will give a talk about conducting oral history interviews and establishing an oral history project. The Columbia University office is the oldest and largest organized oral history program in the world. Founded in 1948 by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Allan Nevins, the oral history collection now contains nearly 8,000 taped memoirs, and nearly 1,000,000 pages of transcript.

Over the past decade, Clark has interviewed notable individuals such as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and the late Congresswoman Bella Abzug among many others. Currently, she is working on the Malcolm X – Dr. Betty Shabazz Oral History Project, which will record interviews with their surviving siblings and close relatives, prominent civil rights, labor, business and community leaders from Harlem and throughout black America.
Prior to her work at Columbia, Clark was involved with the "New York Times History Project," an effort to compile oral histories of Times employees, and has served as a consultant for internationally award-winning documentary films. She has developed other oral history projects in New York, including programs for public and private schools and museums. She is president of the United States Oral History Association and has served on the Executive Council of the International Oral History Association. She teaches a graduate oral history course at Columbia and directs the Columbia University Summer Institute on Oral History. Clark has lectured and delivered seminars at Columbia University's Teachers College, Barnard College, Sarah Lawrence College, the City University of New York and many other institutions. In addition, she has lectured in Brazil and the Netherlands on topics related to oral history and memory.
Each year, more than 2,000 scholars consult Columbia's Oral History Research Office, which boasts interviews with such notables as former President Jimmy Carter, former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Dorothy Parker, and Fred Astaire. Founded in 1948, the collection is second only to the Library of Congress in scope, with 15,000 hours of tape and 8,000 interviews.

Peter Brothers is a recognized authority on the preservation of (audio and video) magnetic tape.  He has worked on tape damaged by Hurricane Katrina, as well as tape from government agencies, major broadcast networks, libraries, museums and archives.  He will talk about how to preserve your tape collections, as well as how to deal with tape collections damaged by a disaster.

Peter Brothers is CEO of Specs Bros, a magnetic tape restoration, disaster recovery and re-mastering facility that has processed over 350,000 tapes since 1983. He is also an active member and contributing author to the SMPTE, AES, ANSI, and ISO technical commissions that write National and International Standards concerning the preservation of magnetic tape.
Mr. Brothers will discuss a number of basic issues concerning the handling and preservation of magnetic tape. Among the issues he will cover are proper storage conditions and a few basic handling techniques to help protect your tapes. He will also review a simple visual examination you can use to evaluate the general condition of your tapes and determine if the tapes you have are still safe to use as is, or may need some attention. This examination, which is now a part of published international standards, is simple, fast, and requires no equipment to perform.
Registration for this event is $40 for MHSA or LHC members, $25 Students, and $50 for the general public.

For further information, please contact Matthew Nash, MHSA Interim Executive Director at 917.679.5884 or matthewnash@nyc.rr.com.