Oral Histories and Technology

            Two weeks I went to a one-day training course dealing with oral history sponsored by the Society of American Archivists and held in the library of the University of Texas at Dallas.  The speaker, Fred Calabretta, is the curator and oral historian from the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut.  In his presentation he divided the topic of oral histories into two overarching areas: 1) conducting a good interview and (2) changes in technology for recording the interview.  (Unfortunately there are no real changes to the technology for transcription. I asked. Sigh!  Voice recognition software is simply not sophisticated enough yet.)

            I was most interested in the changes to technology.  As you know if you have read my previous blog thoughts that I have been working mostly with audiocassette tapes, which can have some real issues.  Now, of course, we have advanced to memory cards providing at least 630 megabytes per hour of recording. You can even record interviews on your smart phone although the quality is not quite there yet.  If you decide to go that route, make sure you have output and mike input capability.  The built in mike on smart phones isn’t good enough according to the presenter.  Also make sure you have an app on your phone to control the recording.  Check out Rode Rec for that. With apps you can, of course, record directly to your computer although external noise from the computer may cause a problem.

 Instead of IOS devices the presenter recommended a memory card recorder with external microphones - an XLR connection for the mike is best.  The recorder he mentioned specifically was a Marantz, which costs between $400-700.  Good external microphones are essential - generally the more expensive the better.  Bose, Sony and others make quality products.  There are several types - unidirectional (Cardioid), omni-directional, Lavaliere (clip-ons), and wireless.  Unidirectional will limit extraneous noise, but everyone must stay in one place. Omni-directional may be the most versatile as far as settings are concerned unless there is a lot of extraneous outside noise.  You decide.

            The most important thing to remember with digital recordings is that they are not permanent.  You MUST MAKE BACK UPS sooner rather than later.  He recommends gold CDs and external hard drives.  Audio files should be preserved in non-compresson WAV format. Be prepared to update the files whenever the preservation technology changes.  Remember those floppy disks? No, well that’s why you need to update.

Next time - preparing for oral histories