Charge
The OHA History Task Force is charged with lending their creativity, insight, and experience to ensure the collection, preservation, and activation of the OHA’s organizational history.
Specifically, this task force is charged with the following:
- 1. To ASSESS and EVALUATE the OHA’s Archive at UNT in terms of content and public access, recommending ways we can better ensure its quality and accessibility into the future.
- To CREATE (with the leadership and advice of the OHA Executive Office) an appropriate and sustainable records retention policy and archiving protocol for use by the office to add to our archive.
- To RECOMMEND ways to preserve and share our history through regular programming and workflows.
Reasoning
The Oral History Association celebrated our 50th Anniversary in 2016. Our field is at a stage where we are thinking critically about our roots, and even rethinking how we narrate our history. The OHA has an archive at the University of North Texas, but currently has no records retention policy and no plans to make use of that archive.
With our new Executive Office at Baylor’s Institute for Oral History, we have enhanced capacity for processing oral histories. Many members and committees have expressed interest in recording oral histories with long-time members, but we do not have clear processes in place for doing oral history within the OHA. We have a rich history and a rich but partial archive, but we do not have the infrastructure and policies in place to make use of that history and develop that archive.
Task Force Chair: Amy Starecheski, aas39@columbia.edu
Task Force Members: Kathy Nasstrom, Martha Norkunas, Holly Werner-Thomas, Todd Moye, Steven Sielaff, Anne Ritchie, Don Ritchie, Alphine Jefferson, Lauren Kata, and Kae Bara Kratcha
