While our project homepage explains how this project has defined what counts as a precarious oral history collection, we’d like to offer some further information for those who may want a deeper understanding of our approach. 

Recognising that an oral history collection may be precarious is certainly not a critique of the collection or those who created it. There are so many wonderful oral history collections that have been created with skill, care, and shoestring (or no) budgets which have recorded the stories of people whose lives may not have otherwise been captured on the historical record. Short-term funding—especially for community groups, academic projects and other organisations—can make it difficult for many oral history project creators to develop long-term preservation plans for their interviews. And much oral history training and support, when available, has often focused on creating and using interviews (rather than what happens to them long-term). 

This project hopes to prompt people, groups and organisations with oral history collections who may not view their collections as potentially being at risk to consider this possibility. The key question is: how safe might your collection be in 10, 20, or even 50 years? Please consider that:

• Older file formats, including open reel tapes and compact cassette tapes are quickly degrading. Several years ago, the National Film and Sound Archive released their Deadline2025 campaign and discussion paper, which highlighted how audio and audiovisual material on tape formats were at risk of not surviving.
• We know from archivists that digitalisation—while essential—is not the same as long-term preservation. Digitalising material is a vital step but we also need to consider how quickly digital formats can come and go. If your collection is held in a digital audio format, such as mp3 files, what happens if and when these files become obsolete and are no longer supported and accessible?
• Collections are sometimes only held in one place, such as a personal computer. We know that having digital collections saved in multiple places is essential to prevent the collection from potentially being lost if the only place it’s held, like a hard drive or computer, stops working. 
• We know, too, that many collections are held by individual researchers or by one person within a community group or organisation. What happens to a collection if the only person who holds the collection leaves an organisation or passes away?
• Part of managing oral history collections long-term is also about ensuring that the access conditions that interviewees selected (if they signed rights agreements or consent forms at the time of interview) can be respected and managed in the future.

These are not new questions. Many people, groups and organisations with precarious oral history collections have long been thinking and working through these challenges. Archivists and oral history collection managers have been working on responding to these challenges for decades. Most major national and state cultural institutions are already dealing with some of these challenges. We have decided to focus our time and resources on precarious oral history collections held outside of major cultural institutions (which have resources and legal responsibilities to care for their collections) so that we can focus on people, groups and organisations who often most lack the necessary ongoing support and funding to look after precarious oral history collections in the long-term.

The Identifying Precarious Victorian Oral History Project cannot solve all these challenges. But, by creating a public database of existing precarious oral history collections in the state of Victoria we will all gain a collective understanding of what exists and about the state of these collections. This is a vital first step. Our project outputs can be used by anyone to help advocate for support and preservation in the future. We recognise the value of existing brilliant collections that exist outside major cultural institutions, and we wish to learn more about, and raise awareness of, these valuable collections that are part of Australia’s cultural heritage. The Language Data Commons of Australia, (LDaCA) of which this project is a part, is also working more broadly on developing ways to help secure at-risk collections and improve access to under-used collections (as appropriate), and we will share outputs from LDaCA that may be useful for oral historians as and when they become available.