Today is the Oral History Society’s fiftieth birthday. All ‘significant’ birthdays deserve celebrating and all year we’ve been reflecting on what the Society has achieved over its first five decades, what we’ve learnt, and how we take the organisation forward.
Our fiftieth anniversary timeline has been a main website feature during the year and this will continue to be added to as an ongoing history of the Society, valuable we hope to those new to oral history. It is peppered with members’ own memories and reflections, and links to interviews and documents, so it will remain an important source for years to come. It’s not too late to contribute your own memories or photos! To mark our birthday the British Library kindly commissioned Camille Johnston to edit some audio clips from the ongoing ‘Oral history of oral history’ interview programme, and these have been added to the timeline.
Our successful fiftieth anniversary annual conference at Nottingham Trent University in June opened with an OHS@50 panel discussion between longstanding OHS trustees Rob Perks, Cynthia Brown and Donald Hyslop, chaired by Amy Tooth Murphy, which sparked a great deal of discussion, especially amongst younger delegates.
As part of the celebrations we also relaunched our popular online seminar series with a new partnership with the Institute of Historical Research as ‘In Dialogue at the IHR: the OHS@50’. The aim is to hear about the work of organisations and individuals relating to remembering, capturing, and preserving stories. The series has so far focussed on organisations working with visible minoritised communities.
As our Chair John Gabriel mentioned in his blog, our anniversary year has coincided with our periodic strategic review and this time it had added poignancy. Member consultation was at the heart of the new strategy. The Society can’t do anything without you all. And this year we especially pay tribute to all our volunteers, who give so much of their time to the Society in so many ways, as trustees, journal editors, regional advisors, special interest group officers, and trainers.
To mark this we are today announcing a new OHS@50 Endowment Fund to help support our volunteers better by offering them opportunities for further training and skills development, and to enable them to come together more often to share knowledge. The fund will help ensure that all our member volunteers are properly recognised and developed so we can build a sustainable future for the Society and continue to offer value-for-money, best-practice support for our members for the next fifty years. Watch out for more details about the fund and how you can donate in the coming months.
Meanwhile happy birthday OHS!
