Getting Started with Oral Histories Plenary

The Digital Repository of Ireland is a member of the LIR Committee, whose mission is to keep librarians, academic librarians in particular, informed about technologies that affect their practice.

We believe that the transcription and coding of oral histories are increasingly relevant topics and so we have designed this Plenary to equip academic librarians, and a broader audience of digital archivists, data stewards, researchers, and historians, with the knowledge and information necessary to begin to plan an oral history project.

The Plenary will cover the following key areas of recording, contextualising, and preserving oral histories:

• Policy, legislation, and consent forms
• Research methods, interview techniques, and planning for digital preservation
• The use of innovative open source software to digitally index recorded interviews and synchronise text with audio and video

This event will assist librarians in planning how they can support oral history research, encourage researchers to engage with their library services when starting an oral history project, and introduce attendees to technologies that have revolutionised the digital indexing of oral histories.

The Plenary will feature three 20-minute talks delivered by the expert speakers followed by an open Q&A session. It will be chaired by Systems Librarian at the Waterford Institute of Technology, David Kane.