Women on Display:
Issues around exhibiting oral history


Thursday 26 June, 10.00am - 4.30pm
At The Women's Library, Old Castle Street,
London E1 7NT

Tickets cost £45 including lunch. Book instantly by credit/debit card (£1 fee per transaction, including postage) on 020 7320 2222, call in, or send
a cheque made payable to 'The Women's Library' to The Women's Library, Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT. Advance booking is recommended.

The Women's Library summer exhibition, Keeping Pace: Older Women of the East End, celebrates the lives of older women in the East End
through oral testimony, visual art and personal memorabilia.

To accompany the exhibition, The Women's Library is running a one day workshop for museum curators, archivists and librarians, offering the
chance to hear some stimulating case studies and discuss contentious issues around collecting oral history. How do you collect oral history to
display? How do you get access to hidden communities? How should such work be absorbed into our collections and what life can it have after
display?

Programme:

Oral History Workshop - Thursday 26th June 2003
Women on Display - Issues around exhibiting oral history

10 am  Introduction
Antonia Byatt, Director, The Women's Library, and Bob Perks, Curator of Oral History, National Sound Archives

10.15-11.30   Community history and display
Rachel Hasted, Head of Museums and Heritage, Croydon Museums Service.
Celebrate!  An exhibition of lesbian and gay lives in Croydon.  A temporary exhibition was produced to display the results of an oral history-based
collecting project by Croydon Museum Service to document the lives of local lesbians and gay men.  This talk reviews the research process and
being "out" in your local museum.

Rob Shakespeare, Museum Education Officer, London Borough of Enfield Leisure Services.  Using Enfield History on the web, or 'Women on the
Web:  Case studies from Enfield Revealed'.  In 2000, Enfield Museum service interviewed over 100 local people who represented the borough's
diverse communities.  From their stories emerged Enfield Revealed:  An Oral History, which interweaved sound, artefacts and images, to
demonstrate the complex links between their individual stories, and the history of the borough.  The session will look at several case studies from
this archive and analyse their potential to deliver accessible, informative and engaging educational content, for a variety of audiences, over the
web.
11.30-11.45 Coffee
11.45-1.0 Enhancing material collections
Joanne Stewardson - Senior Curator, National Library Museum Oral History Project.  Altruism and alchemy:  collecting oral history for the
National Railway Museum.  The National Archive of Railway Oral History project (NAROH) was set up by the Friends of the National Railway
Museum, and funded by the HLF to capture the memories of 20th Century railway workers to complement the National Railway Museum's object
collections.  The presentation will look at the experience of developing a large partnership project with some conflicting aims and expectations.  It
will particularly focus on the collection and use of the stories of railway women within a predominantly male industry.

Ann Carter, Director, Deputy Project Director, Churchill Museum Project.  Do they get the Big Picture?  Using oral history at Imperial War
Museum North.  The Big Picture is a new way of displaying the extensive sound, photograph and art archives of the Imperial War Museum.  This
talk will look at why we created these large-scale audio-visual shows, how we worked with external production companies to develop the first
three shows and visitor reaction to the end result.
1.00-2.00   Lunch
2.00-3.15    Public-private - when is oral history intrusive?
Rachel Lichtenstein - Curator, Keeping Pace, Older Women of the East End, at The Women's Library.  Keeping Pace:  Older Women of the East
End.  Rachel will guide participants around The Women's Library's latest exhibition.  The oral history interviews she collected for this project have
been used in a variety of ways in the show and they will also become part of The Women's Library's Archive.  Rachel will discuss the process of
collecting for the exhibition and the issues involved.

Padmini Broomfield, Community History Officer, Oral History Archive, Museums & Heritage Section, Southampton City Council.  Asian Voices -
A Woman's View.  The Southampton Oral History Unit has been recording life story and group interviews with Asian women in Southampton.  The
memories and photographs collected were presented in a radio programme, an interactive presentation and an exhibition using contemporary
images.  To reach a wider audience across the city, the displays have been shown at community venues, libraries as well as the museum.
3.15-3.30   Tea
3.30-4.30   Plenary
Life after display
Uses for Oral History in the permanent collections and implications for care