New handbook available

The sixth edition of Beth Robertson’s Oral History Handbook is now available.

First released in 1983 as an A5 booklet, the handbook has long been the go-to guide for oral history practice in Australia, trusted by researchers, community groups and collecting institutions nationwide. 

The sixth edition, Oral History Handbook: Preserving voices and memories for the historical record, is self-published under the auspices of Oral History Australia (OHA).

It provides clear, concise and current information about:

• the purpose, value, and reliability of oral history
• the ethical and legal foundations of best practice
• how to plan and manage an oral history project or whole-of-life interview
• the skills needed to conduct effective interviews and
• undertaking accurate transcription in an AI environment.

The handbook summarises cutting edge scholarship about memory and remembering. In a departure from previous editions, the new book focuses on ways in which interviewers, project managers and researchers can support the ethical use of oral histories. This is presented through three lenses:

• ways of evaluating the reliability and validity of interviews
• preparing archive-ready descriptive metadata and interview summaries and
• editing oral histories.

The new book also includes a comprehensive index.

About the author

Beth M Robertson has 45 years’ experience in the fields of oral history and audiovisual preservation. She began using oral history in 1979 for her Honours History thesis at the University of Adelaide, recording interviews with South Australian women about their experiences during the First World War. From 1987 to 1999 Beth was the foundation Oral History Officer at the State Library of South Australia (SLSA), responsible for developing the library’s oral history collection as the state’s central repository for recordings and transcripts. She conducted over 50 one-day workshops to teach people how to plan oral history projects and record interviews.

She was a member of the committee of South Australia’s Oral History Association that produced the first and second editions of the Oral History Handbook as A5 booklets in 1983 and 1985. In 1994 Beth wrote the expanded third edition to complement her training workshops and support the growing cohort of staff responsible for oral history in Australian collecting institutions. Her fourth and fifth editions were published in 2000 and 2006, during which time she became responsible for managing all SLSA’s audiovisual formats and then, as Preservation Manager, the preservation of all the library’s collections.

Beth was awarded honorary life membership of Oral History Australia in 2001 and was presented with the inaugural Hazel de Berg Award for Excellence in Oral History in 2006. She was a member of the Editorial Board of the OHA journal, 2007–2022, and was on the OHA Book Award judging panel, 2019–2022.