Beth Thomas
Having spent the best part of 2025 working on the new membership system for the Oral History Society, I have not been very active as a Regional Adviser. The investment of time in creating the new system will hopefully have benefits for the Regional Advisers’ Network. We now have direct access to up-to-date information about our membership, including its regional distribution.
I have received only a handful of direct enquiries this past year. They range from a community well-being project who wanted to create a digital archive to celebrate their locality to a freelance writer who wanted to know if there was a Welsh sub-group of the OHS that she could join. With many projects we advise, we don’t hear exactly what became of their aspirations, especially if they did not succeed in getting funding. Sometimes, after understanding what is involved in undertaking an oral history project, enquirers decide not to go ahead or rethink their plans for preserving their heritage.
More recently I gave advice to the Wallich, Wales’ largest homelessness charity, who are seeking funding to mark their 50-year anniversary in 2028. They have successfully submitted an EOI to the National Lottery Heritage Fund and are in the process of completing the development application. As part of the proposed project, they want to collect oral histories of people who have experienced homelessness over the last 50 years, in addition to former Wallich staff, politicians, other third sector organsations etc. The Wallich has a track record of working with arts and heritage organisations to empower individuals and raise awareness of homelessness (see here). Fingers crossed that they are successful in their bid for funding an oral history of their organisation.
Emily Hewitt
This has been a comparatively quiet year for me in terms of the regional network. I’ve dealt with several enquiries about oral history equipment, digitisation and archiving. I have also provided guidance to the Neath Food Survey – a project exploring memories of home cooking, school meals, food shopping and dining out in the Neath area.
Over the summer, I transferred more than 150 born-digital oral history interviews from the Swansea University archive collections into the digital preservation system Preservica. This work gave me the opportunity to explore and redevelop the management of access restrictions and creation of metadata for oral history within digital preservation software.
In autumn 2025, I took up a new post at the West Glamorgan Archive Service in Swansea. The Archive Service holds a vast and rich collection of oral histories, and I am greatly looking forward to working with these collections, as well as contributing to the development of new projects that will add to the oral history holdings in the future.
