Testimonies: The rewards and challenges of letting their voices be heard
Introduction
In recent decades, librarians and digital humanists have sought more diverse and inclusive collections to broaden resources available to scholars and storytellers. Oral histories are a powerful resource, capable of providing valuable and differing perspectives of history and the human experience while challenging cultural bias. Oral histories are often the basis for more complex interdisciplinary digital humanities projects that challenge gender, ethnic, and cultural norms. This case study will revolve around the rewards and challenges of collecting and providing access to two oral history collections: a collection of ethnographies regarding sexual assault and a collection of testimonies from women and men who dealt with the reality of abortion pre- and post-Roe v. Wade. This study will address the importance of academic institutions' engagement with such collections, faculty and students' role in collecting oral histories, and the ethics of safeguarding contributor identities. Archivists who oversee oral history collections and their dissemination possess an ethical duty to provide a sense of well-being for contributors who may wish to withhold their identities while still allowing their voices to be heard.
In addition, the paper will address the specific challenges that arise from the collection/publicization of such sensitive and highly divisive subject matter. This paper will identify the complexities of providing access to the content while protecting the individuals interviewed who disclose very personal (and sometimes illegal) details about their lives. The two oral collections used as case studies in this paper provide distinctive challenges of their own. The S(he) Will Fade Collection includes the ethnographies of survivors of sexual assault who recount their trauma and their candid response. The complexities in creating metadata for these oral histories lay in protecting the victims without reducing the contributor/survivor to an impersonal number. The Histories of Choice Collection has proven far more difficult to preserve safely; these testimonies chronicle people's experience with abortion/abortion advocacy in the United States in three phases: before Roe v. Wade, the years after the Supreme Court ruling, and the generation of women and men who have never known a world in which abortion was illegal in the United States. The legality of abortion has fluctuated over time and on a state-by-state basis; how do archivists and repository managers ensure that access to oral history collections of this nature will not result in criminalization of participants retroactively or in the future? Boston College's decade long legal troubles surrounding the Belfast Project, an oral history collection of Irish Republican Army (IRA) and loyalist paramilitary testimonies, serves as a grim example of officials trying to force the release of transcripts prior to redaction. These are complex issues, ethically and legally.
Section snippets
Background
Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) is a public institution that sits on 760 acres in Southwest Florida in the city of Fort Myers. A young institution, FGCU opened its doors in 1997 and has a current enrollment of 15,026 students (91% of whom are undergraduates). The University has seen tremendous growth; just under 4000 students were enrolled in 2002, and enrollment has been steadily increasing every year. Such rapid growth required the Library to focus its resources on student and faculty
Review of literature
Scholars have started to address the myriad positive outcomes of academic collaboration with community agencies; with these collaborations come a unique set of challenges that researchers have only begun to understand as engagement has unfolded via case studies and direct action (Banning et al., 2014; Findlay et al., 2015; Thorpe & Galassi, 2014). Case studies have served as a jumping-off point for deeper analysis into the methods and best practices for all aspects of communication between
Histories of Choice
Histories of Choice is an ethnographic recollection of Roe v. Wade that provides historical context of different perspectives and lived experiences centered around the theme of abortion. The oral histories chronicle women and men's experience with abortion and abortion advocacy in the United States in three cohorts: before Roe v. Wade, the decade after the Supreme Court ruling, and the generation of men and women who have never known a world in which abortion was illegal in the United States,
Conclusion
The work of preserving and providing access to ethnographic works is important. We are the gatekeepers. It is essential to understand the best practices and legalities of collecting oral histories, while acknowledging each collection will pose its own challenges and therefore, we must be adaptable. Archivists are taught to always maintain the original master files, but as practitioners curating oral history collections that challenge gender, racial, and cultural norms we must reorient ourselves
Declaration of competing interest
None.
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