Oral history has come a long way in museums. It's impossible to imagine a new museum being planned without a significant oral history component. For some, such as the Museum of Croydon and the Lightbox in Woking, oral history forms their foundation at least as much as objects.
For other organisations - not museums, but groupings with some parallel interests - such as the Oral History Society (OHS), personal accounts provide a vivid approach to documenting the recent past. This month the OHS holds its annual conference, which focuses on 60 years of the National Health Service.
In the wider community, oral history has developed as a valuable tool for preserving the memories and experiences of people from all backgrounds, but particularly from communities hidden from conventional (and invariably written) history: working-class voices, women, refugees, migrants, and of course the elderly, whose memories reach furthest into the past.
The earliest oral histories are treasured links with the past and for the most part record ordinary lives and unexceptional events that may otherwise have been lost: The Federal Writers' Project in 1930s America includes magnetic wire recordings of former slaves and migrant workers; in the 1940s, George Ewart Evans, the UK pioneer of oral history, recorded spoken accounts of rural life in Suffolk that dated back to the 1880s, and are now part of the British Library Sound Archive (BLSA).
"Older people often have stories they want to pass on as society is changing," says Joanna Bornat, professor of oral history at the Open University. The general view, she says, is that it is therapeutic to have someone listen to you recount your memories. "But recalling the past can also be upsetting," she warns. "You have to be careful how it's used."
She says oral history also provides a great opportunity to expose areas of the past that wouldn't otherwise find their way into the public domain. "The stories of haemophiliac men who contracted HIV for example, and others with an early diagnosis of HIV/Aids, or those who lived in large hospitals and care institutions before they closed down, or how it felt to be a child with diabetes in the 1950s. It's a valuable resource, but it has to be handled sensitively."
It wasn't until the 1980s that curators in the UK started to see the potential of collecting oral history for use in museum displays, exhibitions, and crucially, audience building. Before then, it was largely seen as community outreach.
"People began to realise you could centre mu-seums around oral history," says Rob Perks, secretary of the OHS and curator of oral history and director of national life stories at the BLSA.
"It's creating material for the future," he says. "It's never sensible to collect material culture without intangible culture. There's no point in having an object if you don't know where it came from or what it was used for. Without audio-objects, experience would simply disappear."
Selective collecting
On the surface it seems straightforward to collect these histories. Hundreds of museums and galleries have instigated wonderful and worthwhile projects. "It's part of the wider change of social inclusion," says Annette Day, senior curator of oral history and contemporary collecting at the Museum of London.
"There's been a perceptible growth since the 1980s and this has been helped by the Heritage Lottery Fund, but more in collecting than display."
Certainly, indiscriminate collecting will result in masses of material that is difficult to use in any meaningful way. The skill for museums is in editing it down and selecting the right extracts for audiences. Too much is tedious, and too little is tantalising.
Skills have improved immeasurably, says Perks. "The OHS has been offering training for 15 years and museum curators always feature significantly on our courses. It's taught in MA modules and the Social History Curators Group is active."
"It's compelling to hear older people talking about memorable events," says Joanna Bornat, "but it works better with a range of stimuli and multimedia presentation. If it's boring, then it may be the presentation, rather than the topic. Talking heads don't always engage on their own, and museums need to bring in objects to help tell the story."
It's about making best use of your resources, adds Day. "It's important to think about how best to deliver the material you've got and how people will access it. Increasingly, we want it to be more of a central resource, so that it shapes and defines the exhibition rather than being brought in after the exhibition is planned, as traditionally happens. Of course, funding is a stepping stone to it becoming core."
Access can be even more of a problem, says Perks. "Museums are bad at creating retrieval systems. Digital storage has made it easier, but there is a lot of archival material languishing. In some places it's in a parlous state."
The web is an ideal place to store and access oral material, as long as the ethical issues are sorted, he adds. Putting the material on a website opens up even more layers and levels because you can have complete testimonies. "The beauty of online is that it offers so many ways to engage with our audiences," says Day.
"It's possible to reflect more stories and multiple narratives," says Day. "So for example, the theme of 'home' in our Belonging exhibition looked at refugees' complex perceptions of home. Some told how the UK is now their home; some still felt that their country of origin was their home; others felt that they had no home and a very few fortunate ones felt that they had two homes. So it's not just one route or one identity and the extracts chosen reflected that multiplicity."
Personal memoirs
Not everywhere has as long and rich a history as London's. Woking, for example, only came into existence in the mid-19th century with the advent of the railway.
"Before that it was just fields," says oral history coordinator Rib Davis at the town's new museum and gallery, the Lightbox, winner of this year's Art Fund Prize. Oral history is an obvious approach, says Davis, as half of Woking's history is within living memory.
"Oral history reflects the fabric of people's lives," he says. "Not everyone is comfortable writing things down; some people would rather talk, so oral history allows them to tell their stories as they experienced them."
Volunteers collected over 200 interviews based on eight themes including entertainment, Islam, and Brookwood Hospital - a Victorian asylum which was run as a self-contained community where patients helped cook, clean, farm and were even involved in running their own fire brigade.
Davis accepts that oral histories are subjective and that it's not always possible to verify what people tell the interviewers. "One man told us that he had played truant as a child at 'Bunker's Bridge' and that was where the phrase 'bunking off' came from. When we checked the records we found that the bridge was owned by a Mr Bunker.
"We couldn't change the man's account, but we got round it by including both accounts in a book we are publishing to accompany the displays. As long as it's clear that it's a personal memoir, I think it's fine to include it."
Cutting-edge technology doesn't guarantee a great experience for visitors, and there have been teething troubles at the Lightbox. "Some equipment, astonishingly, didn't work," admits Davis. "Sound quality is also variable - you may find the most fascinating people, but if the recording is poor it's a waste of time."
Good ideas can also backfire. "We had phones where people could record their memories," adds Davis. But what staff found were numerous rude messages and daft noises from children (and possibly adults).
"We had to listen to it all in case there were some gems hidden among it," laughs Davis. "But we've had to remove the phones and rethink the idea completely."
Validating personal stories
Oral history projects are increasingly initiated by community organisations approaching museums. "This is a great way to make it multidisciplinary and cross cutting," says Day, "and it also gives it an authority and ownership because the collaboration is seen as more genuine."
For example, the Museum of London's Belonging exhibition was led not by the museum but by the Evelyn Oldfield Unit, an agency supporting refugee community organisations.
"We employed 15 fieldworkers who had either personal experience of being a refugee or worked in the refugee sector," says Day. They received accredited MA-level training in life-history methods at London Metropolitan University before conducting interviews.
Collecting oral histories can have an impact beyond the world of museums. It can change perceptions of older people, especially in intergenerational projects such as Museum of London's Now and Then project, which brought together Asian elders and young carers in east London.
Motherland, a play about women refugees based on verbatim accounts of their experiences in British detention centres, was performed at the Young Vic in March. Reminiscence therapy is widely practised in care settings and David Clegg's Trebus Project entwines songs, stories and drawings of people with dementia.
Museums have a central role to play beyond building up a resource of archived oral history data, but the multi-disciplinary and cross-cutting approach has yet to be embedded. "It's an incredibly exciting resource, " says Day, "but some museums take better advantage [of it] than others."
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
For other organisations - not museums, but groupings with some parallel interests - such as the Oral History Society (OHS), personal accounts provide a vivid approach to documenting the recent past. This month the OHS holds its annual conference, which focuses on 60 years of the National Health Service.
In the wider community, oral history has developed as a valuable tool for preserving the memories and experiences of people from all backgrounds, but particularly from communities hidden from conventional (and invariably written) history: working-class voices, women, refugees, migrants, and of course the elderly, whose memories reach furthest into the past.
The earliest oral histories are treasured links with the past and for the most part record ordinary lives and unexceptional events that may otherwise have been lost: The Federal Writers' Project in 1930s America includes magnetic wire recordings of former slaves and migrant workers; in the 1940s, George Ewart Evans, the UK pioneer of oral history, recorded spoken accounts of rural life in Suffolk that dated back to the 1880s, and are now part of the British Library Sound Archive (BLSA).
"Older people often have stories they want to pass on as society is changing," says Joanna Bornat, professor of oral history at the Open University. The general view, she says, is that it is therapeutic to have someone listen to you recount your memories. "But recalling the past can also be upsetting," she warns. "You have to be careful how it's used."
She says oral history also provides a great opportunity to expose areas of the past that wouldn't otherwise find their way into the public domain. "The stories of haemophiliac men who contracted HIV for example, and others with an early diagnosis of HIV/Aids, or those who lived in large hospitals and care institutions before they closed down, or how it felt to be a child with diabetes in the 1950s. It's a valuable resource, but it has to be handled sensitively."
It wasn't until the 1980s that curators in the UK started to see the potential of collecting oral history for use in museum displays, exhibitions, and crucially, audience building. Before then, it was largely seen as community outreach.
"People began to realise you could centre mu-seums around oral history," says Rob Perks, secretary of the OHS and curator of oral history and director of national life stories at the BLSA.
"It's creating material for the future," he says. "It's never sensible to collect material culture without intangible culture. There's no point in having an object if you don't know where it came from or what it was used for. Without audio-objects, experience would simply disappear."
Selective collecting
On the surface it seems straightforward to collect these histories. Hundreds of museums and galleries have instigated wonderful and worthwhile projects. "It's part of the wider change of social inclusion," says Annette Day, senior curator of oral history and contemporary collecting at the Museum of London.
"There's been a perceptible growth since the 1980s and this has been helped by the Heritage Lottery Fund, but more in collecting than display."
Certainly, indiscriminate collecting will result in masses of material that is difficult to use in any meaningful way. The skill for museums is in editing it down and selecting the right extracts for audiences. Too much is tedious, and too little is tantalising.
Skills have improved immeasurably, says Perks. "The OHS has been offering training for 15 years and museum curators always feature significantly on our courses. It's taught in MA modules and the Social History Curators Group is active."
"It's compelling to hear older people talking about memorable events," says Joanna Bornat, "but it works better with a range of stimuli and multimedia presentation. If it's boring, then it may be the presentation, rather than the topic. Talking heads don't always engage on their own, and museums need to bring in objects to help tell the story."
It's about making best use of your resources, adds Day. "It's important to think about how best to deliver the material you've got and how people will access it. Increasingly, we want it to be more of a central resource, so that it shapes and defines the exhibition rather than being brought in after the exhibition is planned, as traditionally happens. Of course, funding is a stepping stone to it becoming core."
Access can be even more of a problem, says Perks. "Museums are bad at creating retrieval systems. Digital storage has made it easier, but there is a lot of archival material languishing. In some places it's in a parlous state."
The web is an ideal place to store and access oral material, as long as the ethical issues are sorted, he adds. Putting the material on a website opens up even more layers and levels because you can have complete testimonies. "The beauty of online is that it offers so many ways to engage with our audiences," says Day.
"It's possible to reflect more stories and multiple narratives," says Day. "So for example, the theme of 'home' in our Belonging exhibition looked at refugees' complex perceptions of home. Some told how the UK is now their home; some still felt that their country of origin was their home; others felt that they had no home and a very few fortunate ones felt that they had two homes. So it's not just one route or one identity and the extracts chosen reflected that multiplicity."
Personal memoirs
Not everywhere has as long and rich a history as London's. Woking, for example, only came into existence in the mid-19th century with the advent of the railway.
"Before that it was just fields," says oral history coordinator Rib Davis at the town's new museum and gallery, the Lightbox, winner of this year's Art Fund Prize. Oral history is an obvious approach, says Davis, as half of Woking's history is within living memory.
"Oral history reflects the fabric of people's lives," he says. "Not everyone is comfortable writing things down; some people would rather talk, so oral history allows them to tell their stories as they experienced them."
Volunteers collected over 200 interviews based on eight themes including entertainment, Islam, and Brookwood Hospital - a Victorian asylum which was run as a self-contained community where patients helped cook, clean, farm and were even involved in running their own fire brigade.
Davis accepts that oral histories are subjective and that it's not always possible to verify what people tell the interviewers. "One man told us that he had played truant as a child at 'Bunker's Bridge' and that was where the phrase 'bunking off' came from. When we checked the records we found that the bridge was owned by a Mr Bunker.
"We couldn't change the man's account, but we got round it by including both accounts in a book we are publishing to accompany the displays. As long as it's clear that it's a personal memoir, I think it's fine to include it."
Cutting-edge technology doesn't guarantee a great experience for visitors, and there have been teething troubles at the Lightbox. "Some equipment, astonishingly, didn't work," admits Davis. "Sound quality is also variable - you may find the most fascinating people, but if the recording is poor it's a waste of time."
Good ideas can also backfire. "We had phones where people could record their memories," adds Davis. But what staff found were numerous rude messages and daft noises from children (and possibly adults).
"We had to listen to it all in case there were some gems hidden among it," laughs Davis. "But we've had to remove the phones and rethink the idea completely."
Validating personal stories
Oral history projects are increasingly initiated by community organisations approaching museums. "This is a great way to make it multidisciplinary and cross cutting," says Day, "and it also gives it an authority and ownership because the collaboration is seen as more genuine."
For example, the Museum of London's Belonging exhibition was led not by the museum but by the Evelyn Oldfield Unit, an agency supporting refugee community organisations.
"We employed 15 fieldworkers who had either personal experience of being a refugee or worked in the refugee sector," says Day. They received accredited MA-level training in life-history methods at London Metropolitan University before conducting interviews.
Collecting oral histories can have an impact beyond the world of museums. It can change perceptions of older people, especially in intergenerational projects such as Museum of London's Now and Then project, which brought together Asian elders and young carers in east London.
Motherland, a play about women refugees based on verbatim accounts of their experiences in British detention centres, was performed at the Young Vic in March. Reminiscence therapy is widely practised in care settings and David Clegg's Trebus Project entwines songs, stories and drawings of people with dementia.
Museums have a central role to play beyond building up a resource of archived oral history data, but the multi-disciplinary and cross-cutting approach has yet to be embedded. "It's an incredibly exciting resource, " says Day, "but some museums take better advantage [of it] than others."
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
Hospital Voices: Florence Nightingale Museum
Variety was the key to the success of the Hospital Voices exhibition at the Florence Nightingale Museum at St Thomas' Hospital, London. "The scope was the 1930s to the present day, the impetus to capture the stories of the older generation of nurses now before it was too late," says collections manager Kirsteen Nixon.
"We also wanted to look at practising nurses and the way they work now. It worked well as a way of bringing them into the museum and getting them to think about Nightingale."
The exhibition was simply presented with panels and some objects collected from interviewees including uniforms, maternity record cards and old equipment.
Four listening points, each with 20 interviews to choose from, offered audio clips ranging from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. "We provided stools and headphones as we appreciated that people like to sit down and listen, and many of our visitors were retired nurses," Nixon says.
There was also a four-minute film starting with Nightingale's voice - from a late 19th-century recording kept at the British Library Sound Archive. There was old footage of hospital routines and new film of a former sister making one of the caps they had to wear.
The exhibition and its approach could form the basis of a permanent display, says Nixon. "We have also launched a fundraising project to refurbish the museum; the exhibition was a taster for possible future plans, areas we could explore and how we would include oral history in the new design, represented by Florence's legacy."
Variety was the key to the success of the Hospital Voices exhibition at the Florence Nightingale Museum at St Thomas' Hospital, London. "The scope was the 1930s to the present day, the impetus to capture the stories of the older generation of nurses now before it was too late," says collections manager Kirsteen Nixon.
"We also wanted to look at practising nurses and the way they work now. It worked well as a way of bringing them into the museum and getting them to think about Nightingale."
The exhibition was simply presented with panels and some objects collected from interviewees including uniforms, maternity record cards and old equipment.
Four listening points, each with 20 interviews to choose from, offered audio clips ranging from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. "We provided stools and headphones as we appreciated that people like to sit down and listen, and many of our visitors were retired nurses," Nixon says.
There was also a four-minute film starting with Nightingale's voice - from a late 19th-century recording kept at the British Library Sound Archive. There was old footage of hospital routines and new film of a former sister making one of the caps they had to wear.
The exhibition and its approach could form the basis of a permanent display, says Nixon. "We have also launched a fundraising project to refurbish the museum; the exhibition was a taster for possible future plans, areas we could explore and how we would include oral history in the new design, represented by Florence's legacy."
