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documents (diaries, travel reports). For acquisition and production of oral history sources by Atria
the following criteria are used:
The interviewees are women who have served or serve as specific, special or outstanding
role models for other women in Dutch society;
The raw interview material will be kept accessible for comparative analysis and to be used as
a source for scientific research in many different disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology
or even linguistics;
The interviews are transcribed and summarized and the summaries are added to our oral
history database, which is searchable on line on themes, names and topics.
Once the interview is ready, it will be digitized, a transcription will be made, and a description of
background and contents is made, to go on the website. On the website all interviews can be found
by searching on key words. Since 2010 Atria partners in a project called “Verteld Verleden” (Spoken
Past) which aims at creating a portal to provide a search entry on certain clippings for all audio visual
sources with the technique of speech recognition. The idea behind this project was that speech
recognition can help to make oral history collections in The Netherlands better searchable. The
technical refinement of this project is still an ongoing job, in which the University of Twente is taking
a lead. 8 Once permission is given for publication on the internet, a full version of the interview
(duration: around 3 hours) is made available online at the Atria website. Some brief fragments are
added on YouTube, for the general public (as has been the case with for instance Back in a Bite, the
project described earlier on). The raw material of the interview is also saved, to be available for
future research options, if applicable.
The biggest challenge with creating and maintaining an oral history collection is to provide for
long term preservation and permanent access of the material. Since this is a very costly process that
requires commitment for a long time, and the budget at institutional level is very limited, Atria is not
well equipped for that task. In the Netherlands there is a specific institution that has committed itself
to long term preservation and permanent accessibility of scientific data, on the national level. This
institution is called DANS: Data Archiving and Networked Services. Atria cooperates with DANS for
the long term storage of the oral history sources, and also of course for the historical audio visual
material in our collection. At this stage it is not yet clear how this will take place in practice. DANS is
still undertaking research, and we hope to get the first results by the end of this year. 9
When do we consider an oral history project to be successful? That depends from which
perspective the result is reviewed. From an organisational point of view, an oral history project has
been a success if the planning was met, enough funding was available, and much press attention was
generated. And of course if the project has resulted in new and additional sources which enrich the
existing collection of archives and publications. Use and re‐use of the newly created resources by
researchers, students, and history programmes on national television, also indicate the success of a
project. As does the availability of the interview through other oral history platforms. From the
interviewee’s point of view, an oral history project has been successful if through their interview the
marginal or poor documented group in society to which they belong get the opportunity to raise
their voice, and in this way has had the opportunity to secure their history. From the future user’s
point of view, an oral history project has been successful if the interview is part of a varied and
balanced collection, if the interview is conducted well, of good quality, giving new insights and
perspectives, is well documented with a project plan, biographical research, field notes,
transcriptions and metadata, well conducted, preferably online and full text searchable on words and
fragments of sentences. 10
Early 2013 the Universities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, together with DANS, took the initiative
to investigate the possibilities to create a national platform for oral history, that focuses on
knowledge sharing, best practices and standardization. The time seems to be right for taking such an
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