Can Institutional Review Boards Doom Oral History Projects?

I feel like I am starting to sound like a broken record, repeating myself over and over again until I too get sick of listening to myself.  Why are we scared of digital technologies?  Digitital technologies have a lot to offer historians.  Informational websites allow anyone with an internet connection to access information; online collections allow people all across the globe to view unique treasures from the privacy of their homes; blogs allow amateaurs and professionals alike to share information.  As both Cohen and Rosenzweig continue to point out in Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past On the Web, the internet can be an excellent tool to collect and preserve the past.  The internet is getting more and more people interested in history, and also getting people more actively involved in presenting the past.  I mean, just take a look at the 9/11 Digital Archives.  9/11 was an event so profound, and so life changing that I can bet almost everyone can remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard two planes had hit the world trade center, a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon, and fourth plane came crashing down in am empty Pennsylvania field.  The 9/11 Digital Archives serves to preserve and present those very memories and those very experiences.  The site includes over 150,000 first hand accounts of what people remember from that day.  The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, another site dedicated to collecting first hand experiences and images during Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, continues to preserve these important memories in American history.  More and more websites are using blogs and other electronic media to collect and preserve difference events and expereinces.  Even Barack Obama’s new website, Change.gov, allows visitors to share their experiences during the campaign as well as share their visions for the future direction of the country.  Yes, digital technologies do have their faults.  People are weary.  Who knows if what is being posted on the web is accurate?  Online collections can be unorganized.  Digital technologies can be expensive.  But for all of their faults, think about all of the thoughts, ideas, oral histories, etc…that we have been able to collect because of web?  That information is invaluable!  But people are still skeptical, apprehensive, and nervous about the web and other forms of oral histories. So nervous, in fact, that even traditional oral history projects are being highly scrutinized.

The United States Government Office of Human Resource Protection protects the rights of people who are interviewed.  Many people that are interviewed, especially for medical research purposes, could be mentally unstable due to a number of traumatic events.  As a result, much of the information that is given by people being interviewed by medical professionals is kept private.  This is not the case, however, in many oral history projects .  As the American Historical Association points out in its Statement on Institutional Review Boards and Oral History Research, Institutional Review Boards (IRB) are applying rigid criterias to the interview processes, as well as to oral history practices.   Many IRB’s insist on a specific set of questions to be asked to the interviewee, and also request that the intervieweee remain confidential.  That pretty much goes against everything oral history projects stand for.  Oral histories are meant to encourage dialogue between the interviewer and the interviewee so that the interviewer can capture a story.  It is also important that some of the interviewees personal information be known.  If you are doing an oral history on WWII and you are interviewing a retired vet, that information is important.  It puts the event into perspective.  Who was this person?  What was their role in the war?  What do they remember?  How has it affected them today?  Unfortunately, many Institutional Review Boards are limiting what information can be asked.  Some IRB’s have become so limiting, in fact, that students and historians alike are foregoing oral history projects all together.  To me, this is frightening.  So much of what we know about historic events is by listening to and studying first hand accounts.  That is how we truly understand an experience.  It means so much more to hear about an event like 9/11 by reading or listening to how it affected certain individuals, not by reading a general description in some crummy text book.  So if historians are fearful of conducting interviews because they fear the wrath of many Institutional Review Boards, where does this leave oral history projects?  Will the web, a technology that so many people still fear, become the primary tool for collecting oral histories?  Only time will tell.

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