An Oral History Experience Weekend will be held in Orange on 3-4 August, hosted by Central West Libraries and the Oral History Association of Australia.
Orange City Library Local Studies Librarian Peter Douglass said that the Oral History Experience Weekend aims to encourage participants to listen to and gather stories from their local community.
“We want to help more people obtain the skills they need to record and document oral histories using best practice standards,” Mr Douglass said.
Oral history has many valuable applications in local and family history, heritage projects, museum exhibitions, history of institutions and associations, just to name a few.
Virginia Macleod, President of the Oral History Association NSW, said, “Oral history is the recording of memories of people’s unique life experiences. People can be much more interesting than documents—through oral history the past comes alive. These regional workshops encourage the development of local expertise and enrich the histories collected by families, local historical societies, museums, and libraries.”
Passionate oral historian Trish Levido will be an expert tutor at the Oral History Experience Weekend. Trish is a member of the Oral History Association NSW training team, with many years of experience in leading workshops for libraries, historical societies and other community groups.
She says, “When a person dies, a library closes and I consider it an honour and a privilege to record their most precious legacy, their own unique story.”
The one and a half day program includes the following topics:
- Introduction to oral history and the nature and reliability of memory
- Preparing and structuring an oral history interview
- Documentation: ethical issues, ownership and copyright
- Choosing and using a digital recorder
- Downloading recordings to a computer
- Editing using Audacity (free access editing software)
- Guidelines for preparing an interview summary, logging and transcription
- Saving sound files, burning to disc and transfer to other storage mediums
Where: West Room, next door to Orange City Library, 147 Byng Street, Orange
When: Saturday 3 August, 9:30-4:30; Sunday 4 August, 9:30-1pm
Note: Attendance at Saturday’s seminar is a pre-requisite for the Sunday workshop
Cost: $95, including resource notes, meals on Saturday, and refreshments on Sunday.
Bookings: Orange City Library on (02) 6393 8132
Learn more from Central West Libraries – click here.
Useful links:
- Central West Libraries: Local Studies blog – Click here
- Country Arts Support Program – Click here
- H-Oralhist network – Click here
- Oral History Association of Australia: How to do oral history – Click here
Oral history associations:
- Oral History Association of Australia – www.ohaa.org.au
- OHAA (Queensland) – www.ohaaqld.org.au
- OHAA (South Australia) – www.ohaa-sa.com.au
- OHAA (Victoria) – www.oralhistoryvictoria.org.au
- OHAA (Western Australia) – www.ohaa-wa.com.au
- International Oral History Association – www.iohanet.org
- National History Association of New Zealand – http://www.oralhistory.org.nz/
- The Oral History Society UK – www.oralhistory.org.uk
- Oral History Association (USA) – www.oralhistory.org
Source: Central West Libraries press release, 18 June 2013.