At this stage we are deep into selecting material for the OER from both the Mass Observation Archive and the British Library Sound Archive. We’re basing our selections on a set of key themes which underpin the current undergraduate course, and on which the final OER will be broadly based. These include topics such as: Britain at War- the Falklands Conflict and Northern Ireland; work, unemployment and technology; the unions (the miners’ strike); community, nation and race; cultures of resistance and identity as well as Thatcher and Thatcherism. Everyone has their own ideas about what are the pertinent themes, but these are what we’ve gone with.
Professor Dorothy Sheridan has been doing the bulk of the work on selections from Mass Observation and will be reporting back on her explorations here shortly. Meanwhile, I have been immersing myself in the British Library’s Sound Archive, which has meant a crash course in using their catalogue, and some long days sporting headphones. The Listening and Viewing Service staff have been really helpful once they realised that I wasn’t being overly ambitious in ordering up to 70+ hours of listening material at each appointment. Instead, thanks to the interview summaries in the catalogue I have been able to hone in on specific sections rather than listen to whole interviews, and have thus been able to cover a fairly large amount of material. The reason for this very targeted approach is that we realised that in the final OER we will probably be using fairly short excerpts, maybe between 3-10 minutes. After some discussion we also agreed that, as the Mass Observation materials tend to be very strong in providing reflective content, what we want from the oral histories is complementary narratives. So searches have been focused on finding interviews from people ‘who were there’ and can offer direct experience of some of the key events which relate to our themes.
No doubt other researchers would do this differently. We’ve taken a largely pragmatic approach. It does mean some lovely, fascinating material has to fall by the wayside. I was gripped by the account of a woman peace activist involved in driving supplies to Croatia in the 1990s to feed the elderly and infirm who were abandoned during ethnic cleansing. It was fascinating and moving stuff, but it doesn’t really fit into our selection criteria, so I’m not sure she’ll make the cut as the 1980s material that lead me to her isn’t nearly so powerful. Some choices are totally subjective – someone who recounts an interesting story in a mind-numbingly monotone voice probably isn’t going to make the cut either. The material in our OER has to appeal to and engage its target audience, which in the first instance, is undergraduates. That means it has to be pertinent, listenable and readable. We’ve had similar debates over the handwriting in some Mass Observation materials. The content may be wonderful, but if it’s almost impossible to actually make out, how well is it going to serve our purpose? It’s a harsh reality that we’re having to make these decisions all the way through, and that some wonderful material just won’t feature. It’s true too that there is the potential for hundreds more OERs in just these two great archival sources, if only there were the budget!
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