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OHA members to choose three new Nominating Committee members

OHA members will elect three members to vacancies on the Nominating Committee by casting votes for one of each of the following pairs of candidates:

Position 1 Chuck Bolton and Cyns Nelson

Chuck Bolton is a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) and previously directed the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi.  His research area is the 20th-century U.S. South, and the collection and use of oral sources are central to his work.  Recent projects include a book exploring the battles over school desegregation in Mississippi (The Hardest Deal of All, 2005) and a biography of a former Mississippi governor who became a strong advocate for public education and racial reconciliation (William F. Winter and the New Mississippi, 2013).  He teaches a variety of oral history courses, including oral history as part of a study-abroad program and a team-taught a video oral history class with a documentary filmmaker at UNCG.  Bolton has been active in the Oral History Association since 1990, when he attended his first meeting in Snowbird, Utah.  He has chaired a number of OHA committees, most recently co-chairing the program committee for the 2012 conference in Cleveland.

Statement
One of the things that I have always loved about the Oral History Association is the diversity of its membership.  Oral historians come from a variety of personal backgrounds.  They utilize oral history methodology in numerous academic disciplines and in all kinds of work outside the academy.  As a result, any OHA meeting is typically a gathering of people with different questions and perspectives on the theory and craft of oral history, which makes these conferences both intellectually stimulating and a lot of fun.  My main objective as a member of the OHA Nominating Committee would be to ensure that in selecting the future leaders of the OHA, we maintain the long-standing commitment to diversity—in all its various forms—that has been one of the longtime strengths of our organization.

Cyns Nelson has 10 years’ experience guiding and contributing to oral-history projects throughout Colorado and for the Library of Congress’ Veterans History initiative. She presents to regional and national associations for librarians, archivists, museum professionals and public historians; she also has been a guest lecturer for San Jose State University. Presently Nelson is managing the Maria Rogers Oral History Program (MROHP) at Boulder’s Carnegie Branch Library for Local History. The program has a digital archive of more than 2,000 interviews—all available online—and adds 25 to 30 new oral histories each year. MROHP emphasizes community participation in the process of creating, archiving and making interviews accessible for historical consideration.  Nelson has been a member of OHA since 2007. She co-chaired Local Arrangements for the 2011 conference; served on the Program Committee for 2012; and now is participating on the Metadata Task Force.

Statement
My commitment to OHA extends beyond attending the annual meeting. Service to the Nominating Committee would deepen my appreciation for OHA governance and leadership—the roles and responsibilities assigned to individuals. A Nominating assignment is an opportunity to explore the contributions and the perspectives of our membership; it’s an opportunity to target leadership potential in diverse geographic locations, fields of discipline and settings. I would encourage a healthy refresh of people and ideas, balanced against OHA experience and commitment. I would hope to increase OHA voter participation and oversee a smooth procession of voting activities, beginning with a strong slate of candidates.

Position 2 Rina Benmayor and Martin Meeker

Rina Benmayor is professor emerita at California State University Monterey Bay, where she taught undergraduate oral history as well as literature and Latin@ studies courses.  She served as president of the International Oral History Association (2004–2006), and the Oral History Association (2010–2011); she also served as co-chair of the OHA search committee for the new headquarters and executive director (2012). In oral history and related fields, she has coauthored and coedited Migration and Identity (1995; 2005), Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (2001), and coedited with Pilar Domínguez and María Eugenia Cardenal de la Nuez, Memory, Subjectivities, and Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain (Palgrave, 2016).  She has also published oral history articles on women in the Puerto Rican migration, local community history, oral history pedagogy and digital storytelling. She produced a virtual oral history walking tour of Salinas Chinatown (www.salinasace.org/walking tour) and is currently working on a family history memoir.

Statement
The Nominating Committee is one of the most important committees in the OHA.  Here is where we come together to propose the future leadership of the association.  If elected to serve, I would want to help recruit talented slates of candidates that represent the diverse constituency of the OHA–generational, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation, as well as different spheres of oral history practice. As president, I had the unenviable task of recruiting candidates for most of the OHA standing committees, so I recognize the challenge that the Nominating Committee faces, but also the opportunity to help shape a vibrant future for the association.

Martin Meeker is the Charles B. Faulhaber Director of the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Between 2004 and 2012, Meeker was as an interviewer/historian with the center and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews in several areas, including the history of politics and public policy, health care delivery systems and medical research, social movements, and wine and foodways. Between 2012 and 2016, Meeker was associate director of the center, expanding its educational initiatives and promoting greater public outreach and engagement with the university’s oral history collections. He became director in 2016. After Meeker earned a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Southern California and has taught at San Francisco State University and at UC Berkeley. He has published numerous reviews and encyclopedia articles and has essays published in Pacific Historical Review, Journal of the History of Sexuality and Journal of Women’s History. Meeker’s books include The Oakland Army Base: An Oral History (2010) and Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s (2006).

Statement
Oral history sits at the meeting point of many practices, among the most important juncture being sound historical research and archival preservation and access. As a longtime interviewer and administrator, historian and archivist, my goal has been to encourage – and take part in – the production and publication of high quality oral histories that have the power to impact lives and scholarship today and in the future. I am grateful to have been nominated to serve on OHA’s Nominating Committee and if asked to do so by my fellow members I will strive to identify and engage new leaders who recognize, value and promote these core attributes of oral history practice.

Position Three Tami Albin and Steven Sielaff

Tami Albin is an associate librarian at the University of Kansas and is the director of “Under the Rainbow: Oral Histories of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer People in Kansas.” She has been active in OHA since 2008 and has served as chair of the Committee on Diversity, and as a member of the Program Committee, Scholarship Committee, Teaching Awards Committee and the Mentoring Program.  She has served as a consultant and adviser to numerous projects, including the Lecompton Homefront World War II Oral History Project (Lecompton, Kansas), the Kansas State Legislature Oral History Project (Topeka, Kansas) and the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid America (GLAMA) Oral History Project (Kansas City, Missouri). She has led oral history workshops and discussions across Kansas.  At the University of Kansas, she has led oral history workshops, consulted with faculty, staff and students on their oral history projects and is a regular guest lecturer on oral history methods in many classes.

Statement
I would like to serve on the Nominating Committee. It is extremely important to me that there is diverse representation of potential candidates for the OHA council and officer positions. I would reach out across OHA constituents to see if they would like to be involved in building and creating the future vision for OHA.

Steven Sielaff is senior editor & collection manager for the Baylor University Institute for Oral History (BUIOH). A graduate of Baylor’s museum studies master’s program, he began at working at BUIOH as a graduate assistant in 2011 on various Web-based and multimedia projects. As primary investigator for the Baylor Oral History Project, he became involved in the technical aspects of processing, preserving and disseminating Baylor’s oral history collection, which he now manages. He also directs the digitization of BUIOH’s analog collection, manages the BUIOH website and social media news feeds and spearheads the migration of transcript and audio files to the institute’s searchable online database, ContentDM. Sielaff’s primary professional foci are the value of institutional histories and the use of oral histories in the digital age. His research includes museological surveys of Texas institutions and integration of the University of Kentucky’s Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) software at Baylor. Sielaff is actively involved with the Heart of Texas Regional History Fair, the Texas Oral History Association (TOHA), the H-OralHist listserv, and recently joined the investigations of the OHA Metadata Task Force.

Statement
I am honored and excited to be considered a candidate for the OHA Nominating Committee. With OHA’s 50th anniversary looming, I feel a strong commitment to identifying leaders who not only respect our past but also have the motivation and ideas to professionally propel us into the future!

 

Celebrating by Participating – 50 and 50 for 50

By Mary Larson, Chair
50th Anniversary Task Force

 OHA will be celebrating its semi-centennial at our Long Beach meeting this fall, and the 50th Anniversary Task Force is working hard to ensure that there will be a wide range of activities and conference sessions presented as part of the festivities.

Programming isn’t the task force’s only responsibility, however, and we are using our anniversary celebration as an occasion to focus on more securely funding our association through endowment gifts from members, friends and sponsors. Council has set some ambitious new initiatives for the organization, and we are fund-raising  to help support that work. Our goal for the 50th Anniversary Campaign is to grow our endowment by $50,000 and to reach 50 percent member participation in the campaign, either through donations of time or money.

While there are any number of uses to which these contributions might ultimately go, Council outlined four specific objectives at its recent midwinter meeting.

First, we have the opportunity to enhance diversity by building our scholarship capacity. OHA already offers comparatively more scholarships than most (or perhaps all) other professional organizations, particularly as a percentage of our annual operating budget, but we feel that we can do even better than that. An enhanced scholarship program will allow us to support participation by individuals who might not otherwise have the opportunity to attend our annual meetings, so we are focusing on growing our scholarship program. As a way of honoring Cliff Kuhn, we have also named a scholarship fund in his memory, so you have the added option of paying tribute to Cliff through your gift.

Second, Council is developing a pilot program for a new diversity fellowship program, in which the recipient would be mentored and employed in oral history work during the summer of 2017. While Council plans on this ultimately being grant funded, your donations will allow us to get the project off the ground this next year and demonstrate proof of concept to any potential granting agencies.

During anniversaries it is customary to meditate on the past, and in spite of our overall emphasis on the importance of preservation, we have done less well in supporting our own institutional archives than we have the ones that we might manage in our everyday work. Our organizational materials are archived at the University of North Texas, and over the past year we have hired an intern to develop an inventory and digitize some of the materials, but we need to make a concerted effort to go beyond these initial steps.

As an association focused in part on the curation of various pasts, we need to attend to our own history and develop both a preservation plan for our collection and a means by which our members can access it. Further funding would allow us to support that work.

Finally, we are looking to the future as well as the past. Over the years OHA has taken a lead role in helping oral historians understand how evolving technologies impact what they do and how they do it, but going forward, we need to expand that mission in a number of ways. Council would like to use the endowment to: continue to build on the Oral History in the Digital Age website; develop digital tools for oral history that are both sustainable and accessible for a range of programs; and create an award for the best use of new digital technology.

The OHA endowment has been key to the growth of our organization, as it has allowed us to try new projects and support important efforts that we would not otherwise have been able to fund. If OHA has meant something to you in your career, if you have learned something from its programming, or if you have expanded your network of colleagues and friends as a result of its annual meetings, I encourage you to contribute to this campaign — either through your funds, if you are able, or through volunteer work with the organization.

We have some deep similarities with public radio and public television, because your participation is important to us, regardless of what you can give. You can volunteer to serve on a committee, mentor a newcomer or run for an office. You can donate at our donation website or when you register for the annual meeting. Or you can become a life member of OHA. There are so many ways to become involved. These new and expanded initiatives are exciting, as is the future of our association, and I hope that you will join with us as we move forward into our next 50 years.

Yale music archives featured in recent publication

What began in 1969 with an interview with a colleague of legendary American composer Charles Ives has morphed into Yale University’s Oral History of American Music archive, with more than 2,600 interviews with leading lights of 20th and 21st century American music.

The story of the archive and its evolution was featured recently in Yale News and can be found here: http://news.yale.edu/2016/03/30/composers-voices-preserved-perpetuity-yale

OHA member Libby Van Cleve is director of the archive and shared the link for Newsletter readers.

If you’re not already a music aficionado, you may become one if you check out the OHAM collection, which reflects best practices in interviewing, with an emphasis on detailed preparation, as well as delightful nuggets from musical luminaries about their careers and their lives.

Back in the day…

Big news for OHA in 1975 was raising membership dues to $10, up from $7.50 the previous year, equivalent to a whopping $36.23 in today’s dollars.

A 1974 issue of the OHA Newsletter also recounted a memorable snafu at that year’s annual meeting:

Oral historians who attended the ninth annual OHA Colloquium at Grant Teton National Park had to be an intrepid bunch. According to the newsletter, there was a problem with Frontier airlines, the Friday and Saturday keynote speakers cancelled, and the bus back to the airport from the national park broke down with about 50 attendees on board.  “There’s really no other way to put it: even the driver deserted it after a feeble attempt to motivate its sputtering engine. The good fellowship and unselfishness of some passing drivers salvaged a potentially unwieldy situation and turned it into just another anecdote for OHA annals.”

To enjoy similar accounts of past OHA escapades and travails, check out the weekly series Throwback Thursday at www.oralhistory.org, as we recall events in the life of the association leading up to this year’s 50th anniversary celebration.

Throwback Thursday highlights 1978

Follow our weekly series, Throwback Thursday, designed to help celebrate 50 years of OHA. We’ll profile a year in the life of the organization each week with photos, logos, and highlights taken from the Oral History Association Newsletter. We welcome your memories, photos, and comments at ude.u1633916053sg@ah1633916053o1633916053.

OHA in 1978…

Ron Marcello, University of North Texas, OHA Executive Secretary
(Archive of the University of North Texas)

President: Waddy W. Moore, University of Central Arkansas
Site of the Annual Colloquium: Savannah, Georgia
Newsletter: Tom Charlton, editor; Adelaide Darling, Margaret Miller, David Stricklin, and Philip Thompson, associate editors
Editorial office: Baylor University, Waco, Texas
Annual individual membership: $10

Highlights of the year from the Oral History Association newsletter

  • OHA President Waddy Moore, in his editorial in the Spring ’78 newsletter, remarked that he believed the organization had entered its second stage of self analysis. “In the earlier years we were preoccupied with the what and the how of oral history. After thirteen years of sharing and contrasting what we do and how we do it we have turned the proverbial corner and are moving significantly forward by raising deeper philosophical and theoretical questions about oral history.” He pointed to the recently established oral history program evaluation committee and the increased attention to standards and credibility as evidence of this new phase.
  • NASA oral history work was the subject of a feature article in the Summer issue. Veteran historian James Grimwood analyzed documents and found an “unevenness” in the source material provided by the space agency. “In a classic example of using oral history to fill gaps in the written record, Grimwood began to do specific topical interviews during his work on the Mercury project history.” He was surprised how easy it was to find project participants.  “People came out of the walls to talk to us.”
  • The Fall issue of the newsletter reported on the role of oral history in the women’s rights movement. “After beginning with studies of women prominent in politics and academics, interviewing in recent years has shed light on less prominent working women and on feminism itself.” The article discussed ongoing projects and the Colloquium screening of With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade, a forty-five minute documentary film on the 1937 sit-down strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, and the roles of the working women and wives and mothers of the strikers.

Who were we interviewing in 1978?

  • Samuel Floyd of Southern Illinois University — some of the thousands of black musicians who entered three camps of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center during World War II who were formed into some the best concert, military, and swing bands of the War, called the “Great Lakes Experience.”
  • American Institute of Physics, Center for History of Physics — individuals active in the world of physics, astronomy, industrial science and computer science.
  • The Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History Project — over 100 people connected to Roosevelt’s life and work.
  • Center for Southern Folklore — documenting the rapidly disappearing folk traditions and ways of the South by interviewing people about music, crafts, religion, and occupations.

Check back next week for highlights of 1979…

 

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International Committee Blog

 

Oral History Society Annual Conference, 8-9 July, 2016

Registration is now open for the OHS Annual Conference entitled ‘Beyond Text in the Digital Age?  Oral History, Images and the Written Word’.  The conference will be held at the University of Roehampton.  Keynote spears are Professors Mary Larson, Alessandro Portelli and Anne Valk.

Registration information can be found at:  http://www.ohs.org.uk/conferences/2016-conference-beyond-text-in-the-digital-age/.

 

XIXth International Oral History Conference, June 27-July 1, 2016, Bangalore, India

If you are planning to attend this conference, the following website has details on the conference scheduled, scholarships, registration, visas, accommodation and more: http://iohaconference2016.org/.

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Throwback Thursday meets 1977

Follow our weekly series, Throwback Thursday, designed to help celebrate 50 years of OHA. We’ll profile a year in the life of the organization each week with photos, logos, and highlights taken from the Oral History Association Newsletter. We welcome your memories, photos, and comments at ude.u1633916053sg@ah1633916053o1633916053.

OHA in 1977…

President: William Wyatt, Western Health Systems, Inc.
Site of the Annual Colloquium: Hotel del Coronado, San Diego, California
Newsletter: Tom Charlton, editor; Adelaide Darling, Judy Edquist, Margaret Miller, and David Stricklin, associate editors
Editorial office: Baylor University, Waco, Texas
Annual individual membership: $10

Highlights of the year from the Oral History Association Newsletter

  • Congress issued broad changes in U.S. copyright law, extending copyright protection to tape recordings (previously limited to transcripts) and establishing that the interviewer was now to be considered a co-author of the work with copyright claims.
  • Forty-four oral historians across the U.S. were named by OHA officers to serve as advisors in the evaluation of oral history programs. Institutions and libraries could request an evaluation and be matched with a qualified oral history member who would make an appraisal based on the OHA’s Goals and Guidelines and “general professional judgement.”
  • “The value of the oral history method in preserving ‘contemporary history’ was demonstrated dramatically” by historian David McComb at Colorado State University.  Three weeks after the Big Thompson River disaster, a flood that roared unexpectedly through the 25-mile river canyon on the eve of the Colorado centennial celebration in July of 1976, McComb hiked into the canyon and interviewed survivors and rescue workers. The project was one of the first to receive evaluation by independent consultants.
  • “Roots,” the long-awaited television film adaptation of Alex Haley’s book based on oral sources, was televised to large audiences by ABC from January 23-20, 1977. “Roots” broke all-time records for American viewing audiences. Haley spoke about his work leading to “Roots” at an early OHA Colloquium.

Who we were interviewing…

  • State Historical Society of Wisconsin — members of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), once the third largest union in the CIO.
  • Texas Ranger Hall of Fame — retired Rangers, a program first established as a frontier defense force in 1823.
  • Gallaudet College, one of the most respected learning centers for the deaf — began a program of videotaping interviews to capture oral history in sign language.

Check back next week for highlights from 1978…

 

 

 

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Addressing Long Beach Labor Issues: Some Action Items

The Oral History Association’s Labor Working Group came into existence earlier this year at the request of OHA President Annie Valk to address the labor dispute at the Renaissance Long Beach, the OHA conference hotel for our 2016 annual meeting. The Association risks severe financial penalty should it break the hotel contract or fail to fill a block of hotel rooms or meet the minimum food and beverage expenditure. Therefore, our charge is to work creatively to help resolve the labor dispute in Long Beach in such a way that enhances the rights of workers to be represented by the union of their choice and to address OHA member concerns about labor and human rights in Long Beach.

Many OHA people are union members and we take this issue very seriously. (I am first vice-president of my union, the United Faculty of Florida, NEA-AFT/AFL-CIO at the University of Florida.) Many of us grew up in union households, and our working group has been contacted by prospective conference goers who are understandably upset at this situation.

If you are reading about the Long Beach situation for the first time I highly encourage you to read Council’s February 21, 2016 letter to OHA members regarding the labor dispute. This letter as well as updates on the labor struggle may be viewed at OHA’s Hotel Updates page.

Action Items
Members of our working group have engaged in discussions with organizers at UNITE HERE, hotel management, and OHA members about ways to resolve this dispute. There are periodic pickets being organized by the union and workers in Long Beach. The union is requesting a card-check election procedure with a promise by the hotel that it will remain neutral and ratify a first contract in a timely manner should the majority of workers sign cards asking for union representation. This is a process of union elections accepted by the National Labor Relations Board. To date, the hotel management has refused to recognize the validity of this form of election. UNITE HERE has called for a boycott until hotel management agrees to their request.

Our working group urges OHA members to take the following steps to help resolve this dispute as quickly as possible:

1) Call the Renaissance directly via phone. Identify yourself as a concerned OHA member. If you are a member of a labor organization, please urge your organization or group to call the Renaissance directly to urge them to resolve this dispute now. Some members have spoken directly to Pam Ryan, manager at the Renaissance at 949-375-2515. You may also contact the hotel at 1-562-437-5900. Emphasize your feelings on the dispute, and remind the hotel that this issue is being followed closely across the country. It is standard practice for some managers to not acknowledge ongoing labor disputes at their firms; however, they all keep notes on customer contacts on the issues.
2) Write a letter to the hotel expressing your thoughts on the situation. Again, identify yourself as a concerned OHA member. The address of the hotel is: Renaissance Long Beach Hotel,111 E. Ocean Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90802.
3) For those who are members of unions or labor associations, please encourage your organizations to call and or write letters directly to the hotel on letterhead expressing concern about the labor dispute and asking for a speedy resolution, a card check union certification process with a promise by the hotel that it will remain neutral and ratify a first contract should the majority of workers sign cards asking for union representation.

Please let the OHA Labor Working Group what kind of response you receive from the hotel so that we can keep each other better informed about this important situation. You may leave messages for me at: moc.l1633916053iamg@1633916053forpz1633916053itro1633916053.

Please Join Us! We are always looking for new members to join our Labor Working Group. If you are interested in sharing your thoughts, and would like to help OHA in our endeavor to help resolve the labor dispute in Long Beach please contact me directly at: moc.l1633916053iamg@1633916053forpz1633916053itro1633916053. Our group generally meets bi-weekly by phone or email. We promise to keep meetings to a minimum because at this point, we are focused on promoting the aforementioned action items.

In Solidarity,
Paul Ortiz
Chair, OHA Labor Working Group

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