Where I felt our interviews might stretch beyond the practice of oral history, per se, I consulted other organizations’ standards of practice as well. The Statement of Ethical and Professional Responsibilities of the American Association of Applied Anthropologists helped bring to light all of the constituent groups we should consider ourselves in service to, while the Statement of the American Folklore Society On Research with Human Subjects helped us locate our project within a sometimes controversial social inquiry tradition seeking to understand the experience of disenfranchised and disempowered groups. It became clear that we needed much more than an abiding interest in our community’s history to do right by this project. As the planning committee came to imagine the conversations we would be having with community members, the kind of care and concern we needed to devote to our project’s foundations became clear.

Informed Consent and Access
Once we had collected a good number of interviews, we asked ourselves what we might do with the material. Our sense of the project’s goals evolved over time and included implementing a digital archive tool to index themes within the interviews. (We would not seek to transcribe, as we considered audio to be the primary source for everything we would do.) We expected that we would produce an audio documentary or series for WYSO, that portions of the interviews would air on our local cable access channel, and that individual researchers or local documentary makers might be excited to access the community history for their own purposes. We considered that the trends in our history might be of interest outside the community and that there was a chance our project could highlight general trends in the Midwest. We also considered the possibility that a few key community members could be seen as archetypal in their personalities or the roles they played so as to generate interest in them as representative of a place and time.

With our speculative audience in mind (a potentially larger audience than we first thought), we began to imagine use scenarios. The first concern raised by planning committee members was one of economic rights. Could someone make a for-profit production out of the experience of our community, with no economic obligation to the participants? The second set of concerns to arise dealt with words and meaning being taken out of context and used in a spoof piece or Internet “mash-up” that could be made by someone hoping to stir up controversy. Throughout, we found we couldn’t deny that we were mostly white organizations seeking to collect and disseminate the thoughts of mostly black community members. We would need to be sensitive to this reality. We decided that access would be open to anyone willing to come into the WYSO studios for a listen. There would be an access log and a signed permissible use statement. The only uses granted would be educational- or research-related, with any productions from the content being wholly nonprofit in nature.

But the realities of the digital age quickly swept in. As easily as digital sound can be played through computer speakers, a copy can be made and instantly distributed through multiple venues. With media editing software intrinsic to most computers and many phones, the possibility that someone’s words could be edited and reproduced is ever present. Even sharing news about the project through social media venues produces the chance of putting a narrator’s words within earshot of someone they might not have conceived as a probable listener. The basic truth we had to accept is that you simply cannot control access or dissemination in the digital age. You can set access restrictions, but you cannot promise potential narrators that you have the technological means to enforce those access restrictions. This latter point was especially important to those planning committee members who emphasized the power dynamics involved in interviewing a disadvantaged minority group. We proceeded with a sober take on our mission and our vision, with a deep and abiding commitment to honesty in our informed consent process.

Ownership and Legalities
Along with the question of who would have access to the recordings came additional questions. Whose interviews were they anyway? The initial desire around the planning committee table was that each organization—and the interviewers themselves—should have a copy of each interview that was “theirs.” But as our legal rights and responsibilities became more apparent, the tone of the conversation shifted. It was no longer about who would get to hold a copy of the interviews. Instead, who would have the responsibility of upholding the legal agreement between the project, the interviewer, and the narrator? Who would be responsible for maintaining the interviews into perpetuity?

Oral history generally provides certain legal rights to both the interviewer and the narrator. Each has a copyright stake in the recorded conversation as it is an original co-creation. When interviews are collected and held by an archive, those rights are transferred to the archive, with certain conditions placed on what they will and will not allow for access and use. The planning committee had resources to access to begin navigating the legal process. WYSO was no stranger to the legalities surrounding contemporary and historic audio holdings. Having brought in StoryCorps for a regional project helped, as the station had its more detailed release form, with an implicit connection to radio, to consult. Also, our local community access channel had its own release forms central to their audiovisual archive. Those narrators who agreed for their interview to be both audio- and video-recorded would sign both organizations’ release forms.

We drafted a document based on a basic oral history release form template with some added language about the forms of transmission and dissemination involved in radio both now and in the future. Like most release forms, the WYSO form allows for both the interviewer and the narrator to sign their copyright and permissions over to WYSO and its licensee. Often, the interviewer and the narrator retain copyright of their own copy of the interview. But the planning committee found that we would be unable to uphold our end of the informed consent agreement if the interviewers maintained their own copy that they could use and disseminate as they deemed fit. Instead, we conceived of each interviewer for the project to be in a work-for-hire situation; although serving as volunteers, the interviewers were conducting interviews on behalf of the project and not as individual researchers. A work-for-hire form was drafted for inclusion in the interviewer training packet, stating that volunteer project interviewers hold no copyright but are welcome to access and use recordings per the agreement as described in the release.

The planning committee also wrestled with another question: what if a narrator agreed to participate in the project but wished to place some sort of access restriction on their recorded interview? Most often, these restrictions are in place for a certain period of time or until the narrator’s death. While we respect the convention, the planning committee found that WYSO was not necessarily in a position to maintain individual restrictions and consents into perpetuity. It was the will of the planning committee to recommend someone with such needs to a larger repository.

The release form went to the WYSO/Antioch University attorney, resulting in a couple rounds of minor edits. This document is introduced and explained during the pre-interview conversation with a potential narrator. The five organizations dedicated to creating this project share the same access permissions as the general public. That is, the ownership of the interviews lies solely with the narrators, and their assignment of the legal obligation to use and maintain them according to the written agreement lies solely with WYSO as the archive for those interviews. The planning committee and the representative organizations then function as a meta-group, existing solely to facilitate the project and engage the community.

Conclusions
It is imperative to invest in the planning stage. A planning committee should include representatives from a broad demographic and community members who can contribute insight and sensitivity over a sustained period of time, long enough that the deeper questions can unfold as the layers of the onion are peeled back. A project that lacks a solid foundation is a project destined to create more problems than it seeks to explore.

The digital age complicates already complex issues that must be navigated and thoroughly addressed before moving out of the planning stage. Informed consent and access stipulations form a recursive loop, and lack of foresight in one creates serious restrictions in the other. Be careful what you promise, as technology can deftly disable your ability to control access and dissemination. Participants deserve to understand both the standards of practice a project chooses to uphold and the spectrum of possibility. Ownership and economic rights are serious concerns for many community members, sometimes especially so for those from historically disadvantaged groups. It takes time to unpack rights and responsibilities.

With five organizations sharing a simultaneous drive to conduct a community interview project, we thought we would be interviewing in one to two months time. Yet more than two years were spent building the training and outreach phase of our community project. There were losses during our delay. A few community members passed before we could seek to catch their story, heightening the already great sense of loss felt when a community loses an elder. Yet we go forward with some assurance that we understand the intricacies and nuances of collecting and sharing the life experience of our neighbors. We are prepared to uphold our duties to this good work but only because we spent the time necessary to understand its challenges.

 Brooke Bryan is an independent scholar and community producer for WYSO Public Radio, where she leads the Yellow Springs Story Project. E-mail: bryan@antiochcollege.org.

Brooke Bryan

Source:
The Oral History Review 2013, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 75–82



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