2. General principles

The general objective of any archive recording programme should be to use oral history methods as a means both of documenting and of preserving the past. The process and product of such work ought to open up new fields of research. It should also seek to meet the broader educational interests of present and future generations, by showing them the conditions of life and the variety of experiences of their parents and grand-parents and by reflecting and illustrating characteristics or changes which make a particular society or culture distinctive.

In realising these ends, the absence of documentary and printed records will usually indicate the primary subjects on which oral history recording would most usefully be focussed. Filling wide or absolute gaps in the historical record are fundamental objectives for a creative recording programme and, when they also represent subjects that are only alive in the memories of the very elderly, they are gaps which need to be filled first. However, recording can also be based - even in generally well documented fields - on particular features which are not covered by the existing records. It may be the case that the paper records which have been preserved have, for example, an administrative or hierarchical focus, and that much more information can be added to the historical mosaic of some subjects by oral history recording.

Since oral history has an important role in reflecting the past as well as uncovering it, recordings may also be carried out to preserve a sense of place, time, personality or event. Such recordings may produce little original information but they can create an original sound document, giving colour and atmosphere and a feeling for history that, in an important way, transcends the collection of data to give a unique dimension to oral history records.

The application of these principles is considered and illustrated in the following sections.