Curating Oral Histories ─ From Interview to Archive

For the past ten years, Nancy MacKay’s Curating Oral Histories (2006) has been the one-stop shop for librarians, curators, program administrators, and project managers who are involved in turning an oral history interview into a primary research document, available for use in a repository. In this new and greatly expanded edition, MacKay uses the life cycle model to map out an expanded concept of curation, beginning with planning an oral history project and ending with access and use. The book
-guides readers, step by step, on how to make the oral history archive ready”;
-offers strategies for archiving, preserving, and presenting interviews in a digital environment;
-includes comprehensive updates on technology, legal and ethical issues, oral history on the Internet, cataloging, copyright, and backlogs.

Nancy MacKay has been straddling the line between library science and oral history for more than 30 years. As Technical Services Librarian at the Mills College Library (Oakland, California) from 1989-2012, her job included the managing the college oral history program as well as the back-end functions of the library. She has been teaching information science and oral history at the San Jose State University, School of Information since 2008. Nancy frequently writes, teaches, consults, and speaks about oral history. She is author of Curating Oral Histories and co-author of The Community Oral History Toolkit (2013). Current research interests include metadata for oral histories, community oral history, and oral history in a cross-cultural setting. Her most recent project is developing an archiving plan for the oral histories created in China by the Evergreen Education Foundation. She holds a B.A. degree in anthropology and an MLIS degree in Library Science, both from the University of California, Berkeley.