We would like to start by quickly introducing our projects, as we will be using them to illustrate our methodologies. My project is with Seaton Delaval Hall, which is a National Trust heritage site in the North East of England. The land has been in the hands of the Delaval family since 1066 after the Norman conquest. The hall now standing on that land was completed in 1728, it partially burnt down in 1822, was restored after the Second World War and was then given to the National Trust in 2009. The National Trust, set up in 1895, is one of the biggest heritage and conservation charities in the UK and also one of its largest landowners. In a review done in 2020 the National Trust revealed that Seaton Delaval Hall amongst many other properties had connections with the slave trade and other colonial activities. My PhD is looking into how we can reuse oral history recordings on heritage sites and how heritage sites can benefit from reusing oral history recordings beyond the usual collecting of stories.

My project is at the Archives at NCBS which is a collecting centre for the history of science in India situated at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore. I want to study the processes of institutional policy making through the lens of gendered safety policies in scientific institutions. I hope to understand the various deliberations and considerations behind policy-making in different areas, through interviews with the stakeholders of institution policy – policy-makers, enforcers, students and staff. Some questions I hope to ask include specific concerns about safety that led to action from scientific institutions, how policy solutions were formulated, debated and enacted, the responses to these actions from persons on campus, and the corroboration and/or dissonance between anxieties of campus occupants and policy. I am aiming to learn more about gender discourses that informed policy, and the feedback to this discourse after their adoption into daily working.

The reason these projects have been brought together for this presentation is firstly due to convenience. We met at Archives at NCBS and then got talking about our projects, which revealed an overlap in our motives within our respective projects, which is reusing oral histories. In particular, we are approaching oral histories from the perspective of the archives. Moreover, while both of us are acting as independent observers, we are doing so on behalf of our respective institutions and our work is deeply embedded within them. Within this context – deeply tied to the institution and to the archive – we found that the  “oral history project” format, i.e. recording oral history and then turning it into a book or exhibition, does not fit the rhythm of either. The institution and the archive aim to work in perpetuity, while the oral history project is often tied to a single moment, and is distinctly linear and terminal. The “oral history project” format simply does not accommodate what we wish to do with institutional memory. So we propose a new method of approaching oral history projects cyclically by recording with the explicit intention of reuse by a different individual at a later date, and reusing with the explicit intention of connecting oral history projects to the history of doing history in the institution. But before we explain our new method we need to understand oral history’s relationship with institutional memory, what it offers as a tool to capture or perhaps not capture when it comes to institutional memory. 

In a 1986 paper on the use of history as an organisational resource, Omar El Sawy, Glenn Gomes and Manolete Gonzalez describe how institutional memory consists of semantic memory – or past learning that has been codified into procedures and processes – and episodic memory – defined by them as the unwritten memories within an organisation of a “repertoire of responses” to various situations that arise in the course of working, held as stories, myths, artefacts by individuals. Organisational or institutional memory – used interchangeably – is therefore defined as “…accumulated equity representing the beliefs and behaviours of organisational members both past and present cumulated over the life of the organisation”.

In our experience, archival records can allow us to trace the histories of policy deliberations. We can know when specific infrastructure, facilities, policies, and even laws were instituted. Through letters, meeting minutes, and personal records we may even find added context. What we lose is an implicit, often commonly understood discourse, that informs the creation and adoption of policies by members of the institution, based on different lived experiences inside and outside the institution over time – basically the intangible memory that El Sawy et. al. termed episodic.

On a basic level, oral histories work to simply fill gaps in knowledge in records –  for instance, at NCBS in the OH catalogue, in an interview with an architect who worked on the construction of the campus, one finds reference to an on-site stone crusher to make jelly for construction that caused the interviewee lung problems due to fine debris. They state that this experience led to the removal of on-site crushers in all future constructions. The memory of this event has been institutionalised as a standard process, without there being a push to preserve the memory itself. Similarly, at Seaton Delaval Hall, through oral history interviews Hannah found information on various maintenance and conservation jobs that had been done over the decades which had not been formally documented. She also found how the management styles of the various general managers of the hall have affected the relationship between the staff and the volunteers. This is particularly important in the National Trust because the sites rely heavily on volunteers to run the sites. 

But oral histories can also contain more abstract information. For instance, at Seaton Delaval Hall, the oral history interviews were able to capture historiography, so how people have talked about certain events over time. This is a possible helpful source to the running of heritage sites and how the staff might develop exhibitions and installations to either match or challenge people’s feelings around certain events or include material and stories which they prioritise or miss out. To give another example from the NCBS catalogue, several interviews refer to a sense of alienation felt between incoming students and the institution. These references can be found across students, faculty and staff, with differing personal explanations for this feeling from all quarters – whether it’s the question of open labs, the creation of departmental silos, or the changing priorities of the student body. This sort of documentation of ‘feeling’ is the unique advantage of oral history as a source – and gives vital information about the individual-institution relationship. 

So we fully champion oral history interviews as a way to capture institutional memory, but we need to remember one of the very important traits of institutional memory, which is how it is distinctly dynamic in nature. In a 2020 monograph, James Corbett argues how institutional memory is more than a collection of facts and figures, and even recollections of events and contexts – it is a narrative about the institution’s wider identity. This narrative Corbett discusses comes from Charlotte Linde’s 2009 monograph, Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. In it she defines institutional memory as “representations of the past” brought into the present by individuals. Because of the nature of the workplace institutional memory is dynamic, because representations of the past change with the people representing it, the purposes for which narratives are created, and the changing circumstances and shape of the institution itself. 

And this is where things start getting complicated, because as we established oral history is good at capturing institutional memory, but the format of the “oral history project” does not lend itself to preserving the dynamic nature of institutional memory. There are several reasons for this, the first being the well-known fact that no one reuses oral history recordings, it is in Michael Frisch’s words “the deep dark secret of oral history”. In reality this is not a secret but more like the very large bright pink elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. Oral history recordings rarely get reused when an oral history project ends, which is not why we record oral histories. One of the reasons we wish to record is because they capture the “missing” parts of history, which are important for an institution to reflect on its current trajectory. An example of an oral history project which focused on recording institutional memory but suffered the same fate as every other project was done by the United Nations. The UN did an oral history project titled The United Nations Intellectual History Project or UNIHP to investigate the history of ideas with the UN. It followed a similar format to any other oral history project with the knowledge found in the oral histories published into a several volume book series. Oral history itself is neither finite nor final, and projects like UNIHP – i.e. terminal project that ends by creating a heavy bulk of static knowledge –  build in redundancy by attempting to codify it without factoring in the inherent changeability of narratives in an operative institution. In a paper on UNIHP the reader is pointed toward a website www.unhistory.org, which now will bring you to a Japanese holding website. A further search only turns up a handful of articles and references to the book series. There is no evidence of the recordings being easily accessible today. Historians, like Portelli have discussed a long-time impulse to turn oral history into a written transcript before use, as a way to make such interviews an objective source – but we have far moved past the point where the legitimacy of oral history was in question. Our continued attachment to text-based outcomes has done injustice to the new possibilities offered by oral history.

Within our project we wanted to use oral history to capture institutional memory but the oral history project format misses the dynamism of memory which is so valuable to our understanding of the history of institutions. So we offer an alternative. Instead of the somewhat linear method of recording, making something, likely text-based, from those recordings and then leaving it in an archive to gather dust, we propose a continuous cycle between recording and reusing. In this cycle you record with the primary aim for it to be reused further down the line by someone else and you reuse with the aim to record new material based on what you found in the archived recordings. We believe this cycle can achieve a more integrated culture of oral history instead of having the occasional oral history project. We will take you through the stages more specifically with Hannah discussing how she has recorded oral histories with aim of reuse and then looking at how Soumya reused oral histories with the aim of recording.

Record for reuse

For my project with Seaton Delaval Hall I specifically approached my recording with the question – what will the people who will be reusing want from this? Of course there is no way to really know what they would want in the future. So instead of directly answering the question, I decided to get a better understanding of the community surrounding the hall, their hopes and dreams, and also make sure they knew about my work and what I have to offer by recording oral histories. How I did this materialised in two ways: integrating into the hall’s community and leaving behind as much of my findings as possible. 

I started off simple when integrating into the hall’s community by volunteering as a room guide. I then also did a three month placement where I helped them set up an onsite research room. When it came to recruiting for my oral history project I nearly always had the staff help me find candidates and I have always been transparent about who I am recording. I also started to ask the staff if they had any questions they would like put to the interviewees or whether they were looking to find out something about the history of the hall or the maintenance of the hall. For example, the gardener wanted to know the exact date the rose garden was planted which the old caretaker of the property could answer. I also have been able to work out the location of the old kitchen garden by recording people who had been at the property during the Second World War. I am not suggesting they would not have been able to find this information anywhere else but asking a human is often faster than searching through piles of archival material. I have also been able to capture the various ideas people had for raising money for the hall. These ideas could be helpful for any other property wishing to raise money if they wanted to know what worked and what did not. I hope that by being more visible and collaborating with the staff I make the value of oral history more visible and prove to them how it can help them in their work. 

The second way I am trying to help the people who would be reusing my oral histories is by making sure I leave behind as much information in addition to the recording.This is important because the structure and nature of heritage organisations means there is a lot of staff rotation. Each new staff member has to relearn the history of the hall and neither them nor I will have the time to chat about all what can be found in the oral histories I have recorded. I therefore need to create a document that helps them navigate the oral histories and seek out their value, without it being a hefty transcript. I made a spreadsheet, because nearly everyone can open these on their devices. 

On one sheet we have the oral history recordings breakdown, where I have given a summary of the whole recording, but also broken the recording down into sections I believe might be relevant, because interviews can be studied in the context of a number of themes, which we miss out on if we only stick to the objective of an individual, time-bound project. In addition I gave each section a value tag. The value tags come partially from me, historiography, institutional knowledge, and stories, and also from how the National Trust assigns value to their collection items. These value tags will obviously also change over time, as we alter our perception of what is valuable. This means we are continuously capturing our perception of value within the archive and the institution. In addition, the spreadsheet also contains a sheet with a recruitment plan so anyone is able to continue recording oral histories if they wish to do so. What I wanted to achieve with this spreadsheet is to make an easily searchable document that encourages people to go and listen to the recordings, while also allowing them to easily add and edit the entries if necessary. I believe my insistence on integrating into the Seaton Delaval Hall community and leaving behind as much information as possible besides the recording should help heritage sites integrate oral history into their day-to-day instead of having the occasional “oral history project”. 

Reuse for recording 

To reiterate, my project – on the history of gendered policy making in scientific institutions – began in the course of my internship as an archivist at the Archives at NCBS, which also entailed learning the methodology of oral history interviews. After talking to our artist-in-residence at the time about women’s safety on campus, I became interested in recording oral histories on the topic. I started exploring secondary sources as background work for my project, and found myself relying on past oral history interviews, which made me realise the importance of not creating in a vacuum when it comes to studying institutional memory, eventually culminating in my discussions with Hannah around reusing oral histories.

The plan for the project was initially to record life story interviews with a list of people across various informal interest groups on campus, and across scientific institutions in Bangalore. As with any other project documenting institutional history, my first step was to explore secondary sources. I found the work of Abha Sur, who had discussed CV Raman’s treatment of the women in his lab; and Deepika Sarma, who while writing for the magazine Connect, had explored women’s experience as later entrants into IISc. Both these projects used archival records in combination with oral history interviews they were conducting. I also went to 13 Ways, an exhibition from 2017 put up by the Archives at NCBS, which had a section dealing with gender. 13 Ways was a narrative born out of a catalogue of more than 60 oral history interviews, as well as 600+ archival objects. Having referred to these secondary sources, due diligence required that I track down the primary source, and I was able to gain access to the summaries of the oral history interviews done at NCBS – though not the actual recordings. The oral history interviews had been recorded to document the history of NCBS in 2016. These interviews include both life story interviews and interviews specific to the involvement of individuals with the construction of campus. 

Oral histories have a unique usefulness in histories of gender given the absence of gender in archival records – and in the beginning I was only reusing oral history projects insofar as they bridged this gap of information. But navigating the catalogue as I was planning out my project helped me realise the methodological value of intentional reuse for the purposes of studying institutional memory.

In planning out my interviews, I could not sidestep the problem that in asking direct questions about gender, I would be providing my interviewees a lens through which to view their lives. This was especially problematic as gender is not a neutral lens, especially in the field of science. I’m under no illusions about the subjectivity of oral histories, and the value of documenting narratives regardless. From having read Sur and Sarma’s work, I had realised, however, that my project had a different objective, because I was trying to study gender in the institution over time, instead of how it played out in one specific individual’s life, or one specific moment of time. My project combined gender and institutional history, and as we have established, the study of institutional memory is a collation of individual narratives. I worried that any conclusions I would draw from my interviews would be so fixed within the specific gender discourse of the present, that I would be left with very little scope for generalisation beyond individual experience. 

Reusing oral histories from a past project helps me in three ways: 

Firstly, I was able to find discussions of gender from people who either were completely absent from the archives, or who were generally believed to be unconnected to the issue, for instance, discussions on gender with canteen and security staff. Often overlooked in the processes of decision-making, their involvement in everyday activities on campus as subjects, observers, enactors, and in some cases enforcers, contained reflections on campus culture and power hierarchies that is completely missing from archival record. This led me to include a wider demographic in my interview plans.

Secondly, reusing oral histories lets me understand the events in the past that may or may not have shaped my interviewee’s present perceptions of the issue of gender – which will enable me to ask questions about events instead of themes in my interviews.

The oral history interviews contained information about undocumented events that were well-known on campus which I would have had no idea to even ask about – such as references to a protest and awareness/information campaign against sexual harassment in the immediate neighbourhood of campus by students, a recounting of efforts from students to formally organise into a gender collective that had fallen through, and even additional context around the institution of a shuttle service for people who walked home. In several cases, past interviews recorded the perspectives of persons who are now inaccessible. This kind of background knowledge has helped me plan out interviews such that I have some control and intentionality in where I bring in the specific lens of gender. It will let me ask questions about lived experiences without always having to guide the interviewee towards my theme. In other words it lets me talk about gender without asking about gender. This has the additional benefit of making my interviews more viable for reuse by future researchers, feeding into the cycle of recording and reusing we are proposing.

Finally, reusing the past catalogue allowed me to see the same events and themes discussed from a completely different vantage point, which will let me find patterns in my data and past data in comparison. This will hopefully allow me to construct generalisable knowledge for the institution. Gender exists within the scope of institutional memory, and therefore it is a dynamic and perpetually reshaped discourse. By providing a historiography of gender discourse, reusing past oral history interviews lets me subvert the inherent temporality of interviews to methodologically meet the requirements of studying institutional memory. Simply put, by resisting the urge to create in a vacuum, and locating my project in a continuum of other such projects, I, and researchers who study the institution after me, are better equipped to study the evolution of memory in an institution rather than its instance in a specific moment.

Conclusion

To quickly summarise, oral history is an excellent way to capture institutional memory because it captures the feelings and networks which are not held in archival documents, which motivated us to do our respective projects. However, the format of the oral history project freezes institutional memory into a rather unnatural state since by its nature institutional memory is forever changing and evolving together with the people who make up the organisation, especially as we are dealing with organisations that are still operational. Using our experience of recording and reusing oral history we have been able to explore an alternative to the usual oral history project format. We proposed that when you record oral histories you take in consideration the potential for reuse and so put in labour to make the recordings more accessible for future researchers who could be exploring a variety of themes. We also suggest that when beginning the process of recording oral histories to study institutions, researchers refer back to previous oral history projects and sources to enrich their own understanding and provide deeper and more complex context for their individual themes and lines of questioning. These two approaches, for us, allow us to rethink the concept of oral histories within institutions in a way which makes the process of studying them reiterative, and so complements the dynamic nature of memory in an operating institution, such that we are able to use the methodology of oral histories to its fullest extent.

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Sources:

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