How Not to Spill Coffee on Your Tapes. Best Practices for Preserving Oral Archives

Oral sources are extremely fragile, but valuable research objects that are worth preserving. However, this often proves much more demanding than preserving other historical sources, such as artefacts or written documents, since their preservation relies on specialised infrastructure. To inform the oral history scientific community of developments and available resources that can support oral history researchers in their work, SSHOC and CLARIN ERIC recently teamed up to deliver a webinar, titled “How Not to Spill Coffee on Your Tapes. Best Practices for Preserving Oral Archives”, under the framework of CLARIN Cafés.

The talk features two presentations:

·         Presentation: Two ethnomusicological collections in French museums and the Michel Seurat sound archives catalogue recorded in Lebanon and Syria in the 1980s - as reported in recent issues of Sonorités, the open access journal of the French Association of Sound, Oral and Audiovisual archives (AFAS) - Véronique Ginouvès CLARIN-FR

·         Presentation: The Italian Vademecum, a two-year collaborative enterprise to offer Italian scientific communities and non-academic stakeholders an online oral preservation catalogue designed as a guide to preserving and archiving oral resources for potential enhancement and re-use - Silvia Calamai University of Siena, CLARIN-IT