Letters

REFLECTIONS ON IOHA
By Don Ritchie

It may have been coincidental that formal organization of the International Oral History Association occurred in 1996, a year of “explosive growth” in the newly emerging Internet, but in retrospect it is hard to imagine it happening without this digital communications revolution.  International oral history meetings had been held on an ad hoc basis since the 1980s, but those who gathered in Göteborg, Sweden adopted a constitution and elected Mercedes Villanova as the IOHA’s first president.  Her vision was two-fold: to lower the language barriers between Spanish and English-speaking oral historians, and to turn the association into a truly international organization by rotating its meetings on continents around the world.  In the dozen years since Göteborg, that vision became a reality.

IOHA’s global itinerary has included stops in Rio de Janeiro (1998), Istanbul (2000), Pietermaritzburg (2002), Rome (2004), Sydney (2006), and Guadalajara (2008), with Prague designated for 2010.  Each location drew heavily upon local and regional oral historians, but also attracted participants from thirty to forty other nations worldwide.  Those able to attend several of these meetings saw the impressive variety of oral history projects that reflect the social, cultural, and political imperatives of each place, connected by the universal nature of oral history’s theory and methodology.  Participants also enjoyed sampling the local cuisine, music, and historical landmarks, and expanded our collegial network.

Having served on the IOHA council and edited the newsletter for the past four years, I can attest that none of this is accidental.  Between the meetings, the elected and appointed officials work conscientiously to provide services for the members and prepare for the biannual meeting.  They grapple with any number of concerns about finances, publications, translation, education, connections to national oral history organizations, and scholarships to encourage diversity at the meetings.  Meanwhile, those who are planning the next program put out the call for papers and sift through the hundreds of applicants who respond, set up appropriate venues and entertainment, anticipate lodging and transportation needs, and advertise creatively to encourage people to travel great distances to attend.

Without email and the Internet, this multitude of tasks would be insurmountable.  Back in the 1970s, a graduate student journal that I edited had its publication delayed for months due to a postal strike in a country where one of our contributors was on sabbatical–she refused to authorize publication of her article until she had reviewed the copyedited text.  Now editors can communicate with authors electronically, sending messages, text, and illustrations back and forth among continents instantaneously.  The newsletter and journal editors regularly solicit contributions from the members and announce their publication on H-Oralhist. For the past four years the online newsletter has been edited out of Spain and the United States, with Spanish-English translators in both nations.  The journal Word and Silences, also in English and Spanish, has been edited and published in Mexico.  The IOHA council recently voted to make the journal an online publication as well.  Both publications have included submissions from every continent, and hope to expand translation efforts to include the best oral history work in other languages.

The outgoing and incoming IOHA council members have just a few hours of face-to-face sessions at the biannual meetings.  In between, they communicate entirely by email and on the Web.  Our immediate past president, Al Thomson, demonstrated the versatility of electronic communications by shifting his base of operations seamlessly from the U.K. to Australia during his term.  Council members discuss issues in regularly scheduled chat rooms.  For those of us who lament the passing of the analog tape recorder, the transition to the digital world has not always been easy, but even troglodytes like me were able to file reports online and participate in the wide-ranging deliberations that have moved the association forward on so many fronts.  I’ve been impressed with the amount of time and thought that so many council members put into their reports and how many good ideas they have proposed and implemented.

The most promising change in store is the revamping of IOHA’s website.  Hosted in Brazil for the past decade, the site has served the association admirably, but evolving technology will permit a vast expansion of its available information and services–particularly for submitting papers and registering for future conferences.  Demonstrations of the website in Guadalajara were impressive and only hint at its potential development over the decade ahead, as it creates a global oral history network with its links to the various national oral history associations.

If this doesn’t sound utopian enough, oral history projects everywhere have been establishing websites that post catalogs of their collections and entire transcripts of interviews, along with audio and visual clips. For years we have heard each other talk about how we conduct our projects, but now researchers and other users can read, hear, and see them, without the cost of the airfare to visit so many repositories.  Posting interviews online not only will open them to vast new audiences but will demonstrate whether we as interviewers practice what we preach!

I appreciate the invitation from the new editors of the newsletter to offer these reflections on the IOHA and to wish my amiable co-editor, Pilar Dominguez, a most successful presidency.  If the past is prologue, we have great things to look forward to, and stellar meetings ahead.        
            
Don Ritchie oralhistorians@comcast.net 

Send your letters via e-mail to both co-editors:

Miren Llona (Spanish text)- miren.llona@ehu.es
Juan José Gutiérrez (English text) - juan_gutierrez@csumb.edu