Mark: Hello and welcome to the Introduction to the Oral History Webinar. My name is Mark Piva, Assistant Director of Technical Acquisitions and Finance.

Shirleene: And I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson and I'm the Director of Curatorial and Collection Research.

Mark: The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia's first nations peoples, the first Australians as traditional owners and custodians of this land and gives respect to elders past and present and through them all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 

So today we're here and we're going to be talking about the Library's amazing oral history collection and we're going to do it by talking about four broad areas: What is oral history? How do we do oral histories in the Library? How do we keep the oral histories in the Library and then finally how do we access them? It is an amazing collection and we really look forward to sharing some of the work that we do here.

So first up, Shirleene, I guess one of the big questions with this is what is oral history? Because there's lots of interview types in the world, what makes oral history so different?

Shirleene: Well oral history is about people speaking about things that they have personal experience of. At the National Library we use the whole of life interview method which means although we have quite focused collections sometimes, could be people talking about things such as polio or the experiences of living through particular events we like people to talk about their whole life because we don't know the type of questions that people might be looking to those interviews to answer later. 

The National Library's oral history and folklore collection really is quite extraordinary, it's a very rich collection. Today it is over 50,000 hours' worth of recorded hours which is quite special so there really is something for everyone in that collection. It dates back to the 1950s which makes it the oldest collection of oral history recordings and folklore recordings that were conducted in this country and it really can trace its origins back to two quite remarkable people.

So Hazel De Berg was a truly original woman who has been regarded as Australia's first oral historian so she started to do interviews with people who were quite famous writers, it was how she began and those interviews evolved from her asking writers to read from their books. While she had these incredible people in front of her, people like Mary Gilmore, she took that opportunity to ask them questions about their lives and so on. So she did this for about 30 years which is a really amazing span of time and probably around 1,300 interviews were conducted by her over this time period.

The folklore collection, it traces its origins back to a gentleman called John Meredith who was really keen from the 1950s onwards to capture the vernacular culture of Australian life so he did a lot of trips where he recorded the voices of people who could speak to that vernacular culture and music as well. Today our folklore collection has evolved to include multicultural collecting, we're very keen to make sure that that multicultural heritage of Australia is also reflected in the folk collection. 

So together you have this really dynamic and alive collection that provides a really rich insight into Australian culture and life in a way that really complements other types of collection material. I think there's something really special about being able to listen to the recorded voice, it's quite an intimate way of connecting with somebody's story. The great thing about oral history, I think, is that we have the voices of very eminent Australians, Prime Ministers and people who were very famous for their achievements in our collection but there are also the voices of people who perhaps might not be as well- known and oral history gives them the opportunity to speak and to have their voices heard.

Mark: That's amazing. Are there any particular collections of those ones with the voices who are not normally heard? Because that is an amazing way to get the message across because you're right, with these eminent people, they're normally written about in many other areas but there's some groups of people in our society which normally would not get the opportunity to have their voices heard?

Shirleene: Yeah, that is a really excellent question and I think there's a number of collections that come to mind and I think that there might be many people who've heard of the extraordinarily rich Bringing Them Home oral history collection which comprises of about 340 interviews with people who either were members of the stolen generations or who were involved in removing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their family groups. That's an example of a collection where people speak very directly to a part of Australian history which is quite difficult history but it is such valuable and vital history and I think it really does show what the unique and special nature of oral history is.

Mark: That's great. So in terms of that like given that we've got so many things to collect how do we actually go about collecting oral history here in the Library? Are there any things that you need to consider when you're thinking out what do we record next?

Shirleene: I think that we always want the collection to reflect what's happening in Australian society and we want it to be a record that will be really useful to people in the future in 100 years' time, in 200 years' time. So while we today can listen to voices that were recorded in the 1950s and 1960s to answer all sorts of questions we want people in the future to be able to do the same thing. 

So in terms of the oral history program at the National Library we actively commission our own oral histories each year and we have interviewers who do interviews all across the country and each year they're building on that extraordinary collection of over 50,000 hours. So there's a lot of events that are currently unfolding in Australia that we would like the collection to document.

In the future certainly there will be collections that will talk about COVID which is something that we're all living through at the moment just as we have collections that as I mentioned talk about things like polio, that talk about what it was like to live through the influenza pandemic that happened in the aftermath of world war one. So it's always about thinking about what's happening in society and making sure that's documented and that it reflects the full diversity of Australian society as well and perhaps those voices that haven't always been heard.

Mark: That's amazing that oral history is such an important way to get people to tell their stories in a much more personal, intimate way. Given that these oral histories are so personal what are some of the things that the Library does in order to safeguard how those histories are used going forward?

Shirleene: I think that's a really important question because we're really proud to hold the types of collections that we hold and something that is really important to us all is making sure that we look after the material that we collect in a way that accords with the wishes of the people who have been recorded. 

So sometimes that might mean that we've conducted oral histories which are not available during the lifetime of the person who's been recorded because we would much rather that they feel comfortable sharing their full story and the way that they want to share it, knowing that it won't be released without their permission so that's certainly an option available to them. So we do have an extraordinary collection and a great proportion of it is available online but there is material that we do have which we won't make available online until we have that permission from the person who was recorded.

Mark: Also in terms of the collections are we just taking in new recordings now or is there another way of us that we are collecting things as well?

Shirleene: Yeah, I think that overall we certainly rely very heavily on our commissioned original program of oral histories so at least 90% I would say of what we bring in is originally commissioned material but occasionally there can be material that has been recorded by someone else, someone who wasn't involved with the Library. Perhaps in a previous decade it could be material that was really rare recorded say in the 1960s in a remote community and if that material exists and it's appropriate potentially for it to come to the Library and it's of national significance then we will take in that material which we called formed collections. So it's a smaller part of what we do but it is a part of the collection plan of the National Library's oral history program. 

We've talked a little bit about how the collection dates back to the 1950s and obviously when people recorded sounds back then they couldn't do it in the way we would now with a fully digitised collection. I think there's something that's really quite amazing about the material that we hold, all that 50,000 hours is that it is a fully digitised collection and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Mark: Yeah, no, that'd be great. The Library is very fortunate to be one of the few institutions in the world to say that we have a fully digitised collection and it's thanks to the efforts of people going back well over a couple of decades to ensure that the recordings that were taken in the Library are able to be fully preserved and fully digitised.

We completed a 15-year preservation plan back in 2018 which means all of the collection's preserved and we're actually adding to it at the rate of 1,200 hours per year thanks to the commissioning programs that the Library does. The way that we go about doing that is through a very amazing setup here. We have world standard preservation suites that are able to preserve many different types of formats. Because we're dealing with unique recordings we're able to go through and play back lots of magnetic playback recordings so things like reel to reel tape, cassettes, digital audio tape was a format that was used by journalists in the late '80s, early '90s and some CD recordings. 

Along with all that we're also very capably taking on all these newborn digital types of recordings which we collect through our 30 field recording kits which are broadcast-standard as well as our own recording studios so we're actually sitting in the studio now and so the microphones that you hear are the same microphones that we use when we're recording people as part of our collection. We also have fantastic multitrack recording facilities so each year we have a number of performers coming through contributing to the collection and we're able to make fantastic recordings using those methods too so it's really cool.

Shirleene: I think that's an exciting program and I think one of the great things is that technology allows us to record as you say everywhere from where we are now at the National Library in this studio all the way to remote communities, parts of Australia that can be sometimes quite difficult to get to if you're travelling from major cities because we do want to make sure that the collection is carrying all those voices and that we can record anyone wherever they be in Australia and that's a challenge that we really love, I think.

Mark: No, definitely, that's really good. So in terms of that I guess the next thing to look at is how do we access these recordings so again we are also very fortunate to have a number of great ways for you to be able to access the collection. The first way is to just go straight into our catalogue and if you type in a search term and just limit the results to audio you'll be presented with a list of all the things that are available in the oral history collection. What's even more amazing is that if you see a blue button there called Listen Online you can click on that and that will take you to our audio player and the audio player is an amazing thing because it plays audio as you'd expect but also we sometimes provide timecoded transcripts and summaries which enable you to do really amazing things like word-searching. 

You can also access it through Trove as well. The cool thing about Trove is that you do have a little bit more functionality in that you can actually search for certain words within Trove which may not be in the catalogue record and they'll also come up as a hit which will take you to the interview and allow you to play it back as well. That's going to be something I'm going to show you a little bit more in a sec when I actually show you the screen when I do that.

Shirleene: I think there's something that's quite extraordinary about the National Library's collection of oral history and folklore material, is that it is a fully digitised collection and I'd like it if you could maybe speak a little bit about why that really matters and why that's so significant.

Mark: Oh thanks, Shirleene. Yeah, digitisation is incredibly important. The whole thing about audio is that you can't touch it, you can't see it, you only hear it and it's really important that especially with some of these carriers, the [Lexi] 12:58 carriers that we have now, they're impossible to play directly, you can't buy the machines new anymore and so in order for people to actually listen to them the preservation is the access, you need to preserve them in order to hear them. So we regard digital preservation as basically essential in order to be able to access these things.

Here what we do is we apply international standards in order to transfer the material and what we do is we have a very highly calibrated system of playback and recording which means that when we record things they're recorded as what we call warts and all so when you listen to something it's as if you're listening to the original recording. We don't do any editing here because we want to keep this as a true document and we also then apply a few things to it in order to make it in what we call a master file which contains a few descriptive elements so we embed certain information at the title but also technical information there and also create a whole set of access copies and MP3 files.

So when you're accessing them at home you'll be listening to an MP3 file that was created as part of our preservation process. But just because we preserve it as a digital file and stored it safely on MS storage doesn't mean we throw the original away and we're very fortunate to have these fantastic climate-controlled tape stores where we keep those originals in perpetuity because we just never know when there may be another opportunity that we could play them back again with even better quality.

Shirleene: Speaking about the oral history and folklore collection is there something that you have that is a particular favourite?

Mark: There's a lot to choose from here but I think one of the great things is I think as a collection the Hazel de Berg collection would have to be one of my favourites because she was a woman who had so much forethought to be able to record people talking about their lives that she basically gave birth to oral history in Australia. We're so lucky to have her original recorder here, this beautiful Novatape recorder which weighs about two ton and is made out of wood and is so battered yet she was able to extract every possible bit of sonic information out of that machine which means that the recordings that she did in the late '50s are amazingly good in terms of quality.

Shirleene: Yet there's people that she recorded where the Library holds the only copy of their voice which is I think really quite special. For me from that collection I'm thinking about somebody like May Gibbs who many of you might know for her beautiful work around Gumnut Babies and to think that she was recorded very late in life by Hazel de Berg and through Hazel de Berg's persistence so it is full of I guess gems like that, isn't it?

Mark: Oh absolutely. What about you? What's your favourite?

Shirleene: I think that it evolves all the time and I think that's the extraordinary thing about the collection, that you can dip into this wonderful as I said over 50,000 hours and discover new things all the time. But some collections that I've enjoyed or think are really rich I guess since I've been really exposed to it include things like the Australian response to AIDS, collection of oral history interviews. Because that was the first oral history collection in the world to be conducted at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic where it really gave a voice to people who were quite heavily stigmatised at that time so we have these really special and unique oral histories as part of that collection. 

I tend to really like the unique voices, maybe the voices that are from people that people may not have heard of so could be a miner from Broken Hill, it could be somebody who can as I said earlier talk about what it was like to live through the first world war, second world war, somebody who might have served in Vietnam. I think that it's the everyday stories that make up our collection and make it so special and I think something that I know we both enjoy because we've spoken about this is when we can reconnect people to the voices of people that they might know or perhaps are descended from who might be in our collection. That does happen where we will hold an interview with somebody's grandparent or even great-grandparent and we can make it available to them and to hear that joy and their delight in hearing somebody that's very special to them speak in that very intimate, personal way about their life. I think that is just one of the great things about the collection.

Mark: Absolutely, yeah, we always feel when people give an oral history they're actually giving a piece of themselves to the collection and you can really hear it so we really fully encourage you to have a listen to our oral history collection because you'll hear the emotion, you'll hear the pauses, the hesitations and you're hearing real people talk about their life stories. So thank you very much, Shirleene, for your time today and thank you very much for your time as well so thank you so much for watching and we hope that you can watch the next section.

Mark: Hi everyone, it's Mark again and what I'm going to do is just lead you through how to find the Library's oral history interviews on the internet. You can see here we're just at the starting page of a search engine and we'll just go straight now to the Library's catalogue. Okay, just bringing up the Library's homepage there and we'll just scroll down slightly to get to our catalogue. You can start typing in here or what I'm going to do is just click on the catalogue button on the right. Because I'm really interested in finding audio material I'm going to click on Advanced Search and just scroll down to Add Limits and then click on Audio, click Find.

So what that's done is now returned a list of all the things in our collection which are audio and you can see here we've got 22,000 items to choose from and we can sort these in a variety of different ways by their date, author or title and that's great. The good thing is that on the right there's also some really interesting information here that can help us sort by the author which in this case is the main interviewer so Hazel De Berg's name's mentioned, John Meredith is there, or by subject area and we can expand these so we've got folk music or politicians, painters and politicians, bit of a thing about journalists there or by series. The oral history collection actually has a number of different series associated with it and so if you happen to find that there's a particular project that you're interested in you can use the series title to help you find some more information there as well.

What I'm really interested in though is not just looking up what's in our catalogue but I want to see what I can listen to online because what's amazing about our collection is although it's over 50,000 hours it's actually more like 55,000 hours, a quarter of it is actually available online right now for free. So 13,750 hours is available for you to listen to right now. The way we're going to find it is if you see down here on Eresources, if we click on NLA digital material all of a sudden that brings up a whole bunch of names which have this beautiful blue Listen Online button and from that we can actually click on any one of these and listen to them straight away and there might be some people there that you're interested in listening to so if you can straight after our webinar today feel free to jump on and have a look.

There's one in particular that I'm going to play though because it's a really great demonstration of the power of our system and what I'm going to do is type in Florey so Sir Howard Florey was one of the inventors or discoverers of penicillin and we have what we believe is one of the only existing recordings of his voice in the world. You can see here that Howard was recorded as part of the Hazel De Berg collection back on the 5th of April 1967. There's a big blue button there so what we'll do is click on that button and that will take us to the Trove audio player. There's an end user licence agreement which you can read, just telling you what you can and can't do with the audio and if you're happy with that click I accept.

Okay so here we are and we've got the screen and there's quite a bit of information to look at here. On the left we have some information that's been ported over from the catalogue record, being the title then a little bit of a summary. We can also bounce right back to the catalogue record by clicking on that link as well as some information about the holdings and some things there. For those of you who've listened to audio online before you've got similar sorts of buttons that you might have seen, a bit of a play button, stop button, volume control and there's nothing to stop us now, we can just press play and just start listening to it. 

Howard Walter Florey (recording): This is Howard Walter Florey and I was born in Adelaide at the turn of the century or just before. I've been asked to say something about my young days that I look back on with great pleasure".

Mark: Oh that's good, see? There again just an example of the amazing quality that we can get from something that's now over 50 years old. So we can just press play and just listen to it, similar to a podcast or anything like that so it's a great way to listen to some fantastic stories. But you might have also seen here we've got two sections, being Transcript and Summary. With the Transcript this is actually a verbatim transcript of what Howard says so if you like you can actually skim through and see what he's said and so if you do find something very interesting so for example there he talks about his first interest was chemistry, we can actually go straight to that point by clicking on the play button, here.

Howard Walter Florey (recording): "The first interest was chemistry, I was not very good at mathematics, no good at all".

Mark: Yes, I think we can all relate to that. So you can do that or similarly one interesting way to also analyse a recording is to use the online summary if it's available. Down here we've had someone go through and carefully listen to Howard's interview and pick up key words, themes which is really amazing because sometimes this enables you to look at recording in a very different way. It means that you can actually - because there'll be key words or phrases which may not have actually been mentioned in the interview but are incredibly important so from a research point of view if you're looking across a number of different interviews this enables you to group things together that initially on the face of it may not be that related. Again just like the transcript upstairs we can just click straight to that and it'll take you to the position there.

Howard Walter Florey (recording): "Well it's not altogether uninteresting that my successor in the Chair at Pathology at Oxford is an Australian".

Mark: Okay. With Howard's interview there are a number of sessions so sometimes interviews only go for a single session but here we can see that he went for three sessions, so session 1, session 2, session 3 and again we've got scrolling bars there that we can look at for all those recordings. We can also synchronise the recordings so at the moment the sync is on so as the recording plays you'll see the transcript and the summary gently bounce down to keep up to speed or we can turn that feature off as well if we wish. 

What we can also do though which is really exciting is that if you are using these interviews for research purposes it's possible to cite the section of the audio so say for example we're very interested in a hospital in those days because I'm doing a research project on hospitals I can click on this link and what it will do is generate two weblinks for you that you can cut and paste directly into any document. So this one for example will actually play the interview from that particular point or if you like to play just the paragraph that's there then you can just click on that one there and that will take you to those points there in a completely different thing. 

So what we can also do though, which I think is really amazing, is we can word search within the audio so we do know that Sir Howard Florey was the inventor of penicillin so we're very interested in finding out where he speaks about those things and typing this word in here we have fully timecoded transcripts and summaries and so straight away we can go straight to a section where he talks about penicillin.

Howard Walter Florey (recording): "And I'd only been there four years and the chance came to move to Oxford and I stayed there as a Professor for, what was it, 27 years and things went fairly well oneway and another. We had a bit of luck with penicillin, a great deal of luck in that".

Mark: Yeah so that's great and again I can cite that audio and paste that into my research It's a really powerful search engine, I don't think there's too many players if any that are like that around the world that are able to do with oral histories what we can do here.

So just before we leave this page we can also download these items so we can go to Download Page so should you wish to listen to the audio in a different way you can actually download the files there or bring up a PDF or plain text version of the summary of transcript as well. Okay so that's looking at it through the catalogue. What I might do now is show you a bit of added extra functionality that can be searched through when we go through Trove. So we're now in the Trove homepage and Trove is an amazing search portal because it groups together so many records. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little bit of a trick where I'm just going to type in a term called "NLA.obj" and what that's going to do is limit my search term to things within the Library because digital objects within the Library all have this little prefix there. 

Now the interesting thing about the catalogue record to do with Sir Howard Florey's interview is that it talks about a lot of different things but what it doesn't mention is a thing called lysozyme and the lysozyme was a very important component part of his research and because I'm very interested in this term I want to type it in. It's not in the catalogue record but what's really interesting is that it's actually embedded within the timecoded transcript and summary of the interview. So what I've done here is just put together a little term, NLA.obj lysozyme, press enter. It's going to bring up a lot of different things to do with lysozyme but if I go across the top to music, audio and video I can see here that's brought back one hit, being the fantastic interview we've just been listening to. I'll click on that interview and I can see a couple of things there, listen, listen. Brings up our player. Now if I type in lysozyme again all of a sudden I'm where he starts talking about that, I can go straight to that section - 

Howard Walter Florey (recording): "... but in the laboratory at that time we were working on an antibacterial substance named lysozyme".

Mark: So what's really powerful is that all of a sudden we've gone way beyond the catalogue record straight to the actual transcript and summary. So it's a really great way to find exactly what you're after really quickly. That concludes my demonstration of searching and finding the Library's amazing collection of oral histories online. You'll have no shortage of things to listen to with over 13,750 hours available. I thoroughly encourage you to go online and have a listen right now.