By Ron Chew

This article was published in Museum News, November/December, 2002.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the gathering of oral histories—recorded, first-person interviews—was derided as the dubious pursuit of untrained amateurs, whose only skill was the ability to ask questions and turn on a tape recorder. Traditional historians scoffed at oral history’s reliability and usefulness. Archivists cringed at the prospect of having to make space for the storage of tapes and transcripts. Museum professionals, accustomed to working with stoic relics of the past, struggled with the notion of allowing living voices to invade the hallowed exhibition space.

There are still skeptics, but the tide of thinking clearly has changed. Oral history has begun to permeate the museum—having proven its value as a research and organizing tool, a component of exhibitions, and a document worth preserving in the collection archive. “I don’t think oral history is in its full flowering yet,” says Barbara Franco, president and CEO of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. “I think we’re just beginning to understand why it’s so attractive to our audiences.”

Some scholars trace the roots of oral historyto 1948, when the first modern oral history archives were established at ColumbiaUniversity. Somewhere between the bulky wire recorders of that era andthe lightweight digital video cameras of today, oral history evolved into its own academic discipline. During that time, oral historians have moved from a preoccupation with “great leaders” to a broader focus on individuals at all levels of society, especially those whose experiences have been absent from the historical record—workers, dissenters, recent immigrants, ethnic minorities, and farmers, for example.

“Oral history, in its infancy from 1948 to the mid-’60s, was [used] to gather information to supplement existing archives,” says veteran oral historian and author Ron Grele. “Its purpose was to build up the record. By and large, people went out in the field to get data. There was a radical shift in the ’60s and ’70s. People began to look at oral history as a text in itself. What could the text tell us about the interior life of the people?”

Carey Caldwell, curator of special projects at the Oakland Museum of California, was previously founding director of the Suquamish Tribal Cultural Center and Suquamish Museum in Washington state, where she gathered first-person interviews with tribal elders. A college history professor introduced her to the idea of using non-traditional resources to supplement the historical record: “He once sent me on a wild goose to research peasants and women in the French Revolution. Guess what? I couldn’t find written material. The light went on in my head; the voices were absent.”

By the 1970s and ’80s, oral history had moved out of the halls of academia and library archives and onto the exhibition floor—and with good reason. Most museums were born out of their physical collections—the “stuff.” But in recent decades, as educators advocated for stronger public education and more interpretation, it was no longer sufficient to throw the stuff—whether a Picasso painting, Tyrannosaurus jaw, or Civil War rifle—onto the exhibit floor and expect the visitors to comprehend fully what they were seeing. Curators began to make room for more explanatory text and other learning aids, including first-person stories. The general public—not just the collectors and subject specialists—finally was invited to the party, to be part of this now richer museum-going experience.

“One of the biggest changes in thinking is the distinction between artifacts and meaning,” Franco says. “You could have a lot of artifacts, but the challenge is how you create meaning out of the artifacts. Oral history could help in creating that meaning.”

According to Richard Rabinowitz, president of the American History Workshop, at least three factors led to the emergence of oral histories in museums. First, the focus of historians turned, at long last, toward the 20th century. “You couldn’t do oral histories with colonial stuff or Victorian folks,” he says.

Second, due to Vietnam-era T.V. journalism, the ease of news-gathering from remote locations, and a changing social ethos, the perspectives of ordinary people, “the man on the street,” found a public forum, providing stark contrast to the pronouncements of the “Washington, D.C., guys in the $700 suits who clearly didn’t know what was going on,” says Rabinowitz. “This led to a turn toward the visitor’s emotional identification with the story.” 

Third, the “liveliness” and “progressiveness” of video made it possible to use oral history to see “the world through the mind of the informant,” he says. The visitor could experience the exhibit as a conversation with the subject rather than as a lecture from “a masked authority figure with a very remote kind of knowledge.” 

As a result, oral history has become a major strategy in the retailoring of the museum-going experience, making it more inviting, contemporary, and accessible. So much so, Rabinowitz says, that a place like the New-York Historical Society now “can’t imagine doing an exhibit on New York City history without interviewing someone.”

Transcribed quotes, sound bites, and video segments from oral history interviews have given birth to new kinds of “interactive” spaces in the gallery. These changes came more quickly to institutions receptive to the intrusions of sound, motion, and “touch and feel,” such as science centers and children’s museums, and to ethnic-specific museums, where “talking stories” have always had a vibrant connection to objects made and used by people.

“Back in the 1970s, there was a growing consciousness of the importance of first-person interpretation and the possibilities for using oral history,” Caldwell says. “In Suquamish, our priority was to document the elders while they were still around. First we developed a photographic archives, and took photographs into the community for identification. With memories stirred, we followed with an oral history project. Quotes from those interviews play a central role in our exhibitions, media productions, and publications.”

At the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository in Kodiak, Alaska, a vital part of the work is conducting interviews with elders who speak in Alutiiq, a language passed on in the oral tradition. These interviews, says Executive Director Sven Haakanson, Jr., relate to a significant collection of more than 100,000 historic and prehistoric items, much of it unearthed during archaeological excavations.

Sometimes, as in the case of a recent dig at a site called Refuge Rock, which was seized by the Russians in 1784, Alutiiq stories can paint a very vivid picture. In that incident, 500 Natives were brutally killed. A 1992 excavation yielded the crushed skull of a young woman, who had been bludgeoned by a blunt object. A year after the discovery of the remains, Haakanson learned from his mother that the Alutiiq word for the site was Awa’uq, which means “to be numb.” As he explains, “there was such huge devastation that people blocked it out.” Everything had been repressed.

“We try to record as much as we can of the oral stories and utilize that voice in interpreting our exhibits,” Haakanson adds. “We take the artifact—the bowl or object—and show it to the elders and record the stories as they explain what it meant to them. It makes the piece [come] alive.”

The Children’s Museum in Boston has been working with family stories for years, says Leslie Swartz, vice president for program development, starting in the late 1980s with an exhibition titled “Kid’s Bridge.” It focused on how kids define themselves and their neighborhoods and how they deal with issues like prejudice and discrimination. The project, which later became a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition, was one of the first multicultural exhibitions in a children’s museum. Through kids’ voices, audiences were introduced to the idea of cultural identity and ethnic neighborhoods.

“Kids want to hear from other kids,” Swartz says. “With oral history, you’re not saying this is what every person does or says or feels. This is how this one person feels. If you have a person’s story, it can’t be wrong. Exhibits are about weaving together these stories.”

Historian and filmmaker Selma Thomas came to the work of oral histories in 1987, when she helped develop the long-term exhibition, “A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution,” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Thomas’s first museum project, “A More Perfect Union” was a milestone for the Smithsonian, which was more accustomed to assembling objects than collecting stories. It focuses on the story of the 110,000 Japanese Americans who were forced into internment camps during World War II, and remains on view, its technology a bit dated, but its story still powerful.

Interviews that Thomas conducted with eight Japanese-American internees are presented on two video monitors inside the gallery. “We asked people to talk only about their own experiences,” she says. “We wanted to create a document that was incontestable, so that even museum visitors who were strangers to the story would have to accept it as true. If you believe in the power of the historical record, this is it. But the oral history also gives it a humanity that is often lacking in other kinds of documents.” Thomas describes eyewitness accounts of history—testimonials—as powerful, “generous acts” by individuals. “You’re asking a person to relive a painful moment and make it part of the public record. It’s very invasive. But unless they do it, some part of the historical record is missing from the public forum.”

In recent years, many successful oral history projects in museums have been broad-based efforts to document older American neighborhoods, made hollow by the rapid pace of social, political, and economic change and the silent passage of the World War II generation. These “place-based” oral history projects—guided by community advisory committees and partnering organizations—have raced to capture, on tape recorders and video cameras, the color and detail of the lives of pioneer elders, whose stories can serve as an informational road map for newer residents and the younger generation.

For example, “Boyle Heights: The Power of Place,” is a new exhibition about a Los Angeles neighborhood of Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, Italian, German, Irish, Armenian, Russian Molokan, and African-American families. It is on display through Feb. 23, 2003, at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, which developed the show in collaboration with several other organizations, including a neighborhood high school. Fifty mostly videotaped interviews were conducted by a team of scholars, a retired volunteer, and university and high school students. “It’s through interviews that you have the opportunity to learn the stories about people’s relationships with other people,” says Associate Curator Sojin Kim, “and you begin to understand the dynamics of community interactions.

“The interviews were done under varied conditions,” she continues. “They’re eclectic. But the strength is that we have different types of interviewers.” According to Kim, some of the most interesting stories came from the high school students, who were able to elicit fuller stories from the older interviewees.

At the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS), an oral history project led to an exhibition called “Finding a Place, Maintaining Ties: Greater Hartford’s West Indians.” According to staff, the show is helping to enrich programming at the institution, which is the seventh-oldest historical society in the United States, founded in 1825. At the core of “Finding a Place” are 37 oral histories, painstakingly developed over three years; the project documented the lives of Jamaican men who arrived in the Hartford area in the 1940s to work on local tobacco farms. Fiona Vernal, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University, conducted interviews with these “first-wave” pioneers, working closely with the West Indian Social Club of Hartford. She also documented Jamaicans who arrived in later decades, including women and children, as well as immigrants from other Caribbean nations.

“I don’t think we would hear their stories except for oral histories,” says Vernal. “These aren’t people who are going to be writing in journals about their experiences. You’re not going to find them in the archives. Many of the first pioneers encountered a brand of racism that they weren’t accustomed to in the West Indies. When they came here, they were immediately hit over the head by the fact that they were black.”

Vernal, a Jamaican immigrant who came to this country at the age of 12 with her mother and sister, believes her background helped her gain access to community members. “If I wasn’t from the West Indies, it would have been extremely difficult,” she says. “[An outsider] couldn’t understand how they could play dominoes for six hours or the insider Caribbean jokes.” The project also helped her to appreciate the challenges her mother faced: “It reminded me that I don’t say ‘thank you’ enough.”

According to CHS Executive Director David Kahn, the exhibition, which runs through May 2, 2003, has attracted many West Indians to the museum. “We got about 350 people at the opening,” he says. “They brought a lot of kids, which isn’t usually the case at openings. They viewed this as a family event.”

But, he adds, “we can’t say that there’s been a big bump up in white audiences. We can’t say we’ve seen a zillion African Americans coming into the museum.” Still, Kahn sees “Finding a Place, Maintaining Ties” as a “long-term process of building relationships,” particularly as the institution begins planning for a new facility.

Similarly, the Japanese American National Museum views the Boyle Heights project as a building block for the institution’s future. “We had a very active community advisory committee,” says Project Director Audrey Lee Sung. “We hope these relationships continue beyond the life of the project.” The museum will be seeking broad community support as it begins constructing a National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, scheduled to open in 2004.

At the Anacostia Museum, an exhibition titled “Black Mosaic: Community, Race, and Ethnicity Among Black Immigrants in Washington, D.C.” convinced staff of the “power and importance of oral histories,” says Senior Curator Portia James. Mounted in 1995 and three years in the making, the exhibition was the museum’s first contemporary multilingual and multicultural project.

“Black Mosaic” united objects, photographs, and interviews in a powerful symphony of stories about memory, culture, and aspirations. The project was a complex undertaking, guided by several community advisory committees and presented in three languages: English, Spanish, and French. The center of the exhibition was four listening stations, where visitors could put on headsets and listen to interview subjects speak in their first languages.

“Some people walked straight to the listening stations and after they were done there, they left,” James says. “I can’t describe how powerful it was. The human voice resonates with human emotion. . . . You may not understand the language, but you can feel the emotions of what they’re saying.”

Oral histories sometimes are used to tell the story of the people who lived in a historic building, now preserved and restored with period artifacts. The oral histories transform the rooms into places of continuous memory, starting with those who first inhabited the spaces many decades ago and ending with living descendants.

The Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center in Makawao, Hawaii, once served as the living and dining rooms of a home on a 10-acre sugar plantation. In spring 2002, the center hosted “Cane Crossings,” an exhibition of six artists, including the great-granddaughter of plantation owners and several descendants of plantation workers. They created artworks that expressed how sugar, a dying industry in Hawaii, had affected them, their families, and their community.

The artists were asked to write a personal statement to accompany the artworks. “I thought they were going to write about the art, but they ended up writing about something much more beautiful, sensitive, and nostalgic,” says Inger Tully, exhibits coordinator and curator of the show. “They wrote about the struggles and the vanishing way of life and their feelings, but they mostly wrote without anger.”

The Maymont estate in Richmond, Va., is expanding its historical interpretation by restoring the domestic-service areas of the site’s 30-room mansion. The 100-acre estate was the home of railroad tycoon James Dooley and his wife, Sallie, from 1893 to 1925. Since 1975, the house museum has been operated by the nonprofit Maymont Foundation, and 12 restored rooms on the upper floors have been interpreted as a Gilded Age showplace. Restoration of the domestic-service areas will allow the foundation to interpret Maymont as a workplace as well.

Dale Wheary, the foundation’s director of historical collections and programs, notes that the couple’s papers—including architectural plans, records regarding acquisition of furnishings, and personal papers—were burned after Mrs. Dooley’s death in 1925, according to her instructions. “The Dooleys had no children,” Wheary says, “so oral history [of others] has been a way to document the family and the individuals who worked here.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded two grants to support the creation of a permanent exhibition (to open by spring 2005) on domestic service at Maymont and in the Gilded Age South, illuminating the important role of the African-American workers whose labor sustained the estate. Guest curator Elizabeth O’Leary says the oral histories “blossomed to conversations with over 50 individuals, sometimes more than once.” As she networked with prominent black ministers, O’Leary was able to find the descendants of Maymont workers. She also interviewed white people who lived in similar Richmond households of the period.

“Through the oral histories, a lot of our assumptions were dispelled,” O’Leary says. “The Dooleys, for example, were quite wealthy, and we had assumed that they would keep up with the latest domestic conveniences. But in talking with the older folks, we realized that even in affluent families the laundry was still done on the washboard by hand [and] pressed with flat irons heated on stoves.” Though Maymont was wired for electricity when it was built, there were no electrical wall outlets in the service rooms.

“We learned about local customs, too,” says O’Leary. “Domestic workers in Richmond worked every day, and had Thursday afternoons off. The oral histories just changed our interpretive approach and understanding of the furnishings and functions of the rooms.”

In recent years, many history museums have turned to oral history in an effort to revitalize their institutions. According to Nina Archabal, director of the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), St. Paul, the construction of the Minnesota History Center in 1991 was a “conscious decision” to develop a more lively kind of history museum. “Our guiding principle was that history is most powerful when people are able to engage it on a personal level, both emotional and intellectual,” she says. “Our goal with the History Center was to enable our visitors to make a connection to the past. Certainly, the society’s museum work is grounded in artifacts, but the first-person voice is a central feature of our exhibitions.” 

Archabal and Barbara Franco, who worked at MHS at the time, say the audience research that guided the center’s creation uncovered a great interest in first-person stories. According to Archabal, respondents saw traditional history museums as boring places, unconnected to their lives, not worth visiting. “All the research we did indicated that people were interested in controversial and difficult issues, but they didn’t want it digested,” says Franco. “They wanted the raw materials, the original voices. They wanted to hear all sides. And they wanted to hear from the original sources.”

The center’s opening exhibition, “Minnesota: A to Z,” had 26 sections, corresponding to the letters of the alphabet. The letter “V” stood for “Voices.” This section of the exhibit was simply an open booth with a couple of stools and a computer screen. People could touch the screen and select a voice—such as Hubert Humphrey giving his famous civil rights speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, or Mattie Vera Rhodes recalling her childhood in Stillwater, Minn. Says Archabal: “What struck me from the beginning was that people found their way to that spot. The chairs never cooled.”

MHS’s current project is Mill City Museum, which is being constructed within the burned-out ruin of a National Landmark flour mill, and will open in 2003. A feature of the museum will be the “Flour Tower,”  which will invite visitors to take an eight-story, freight-elevator ride through a simulated mill. The elevator will make a series of stops, following the course of the flour as it moves through the mill. Visitors also will “meet” the workers on each floor, who describe their lives, including the shock of losing their jobs when the mill closed. While the oral histories in “Minnesota: A to Z” came from the museum’s archives, those for the “Flour Tower” came from recent interviews gathered at the same time as exhibit objects. Says Exhibit Developer Kate Roberts: “If you can get the mill workers to talk about the objects, you’re getting the people who know best.”

My own institution, the Wing Luke Asian Museum, a small community-based institution in an Asian innercity neighborhood in Seattle, also began to embrace the power of community stories in 1991. Under new leadership, the museum decided that the artifacts in its collection—mostly objects from Asia  collected and donated by non-Asians—could not serve as the sole, or even primary, vehicle for expressing the culture, history, or art of Asian Pacific American experience.

Since then, the backbone of nearly every new exhibition at the Wing Luke—more than a dozen major projects—has been newly created oral histories. Each project has yielded anywhere from 15 to 70 recorded interviews, produced through the joint efforts of museum staff and an ad hoc advisory committee of elders, teachers, students, artists, and community leaders. The topics have included media stereotypes, contemporary artists, veterans, AIDS, recent immigrants, cultural celebrations, and music. Last year, the award-winning “If Tired Hands Could Talk: Stories of Asian Pacific American Garment Workers” was developed around the notion that oral histories—presented via video projection and audio—could supplant artifacts as the physical and emotional core of the exhibition.

More recently, the museum has begun experimenting with a new type of exhibition. The “community response” exhibition is created on a short timeline using “journalistic” interview techniques and a faster design and installation process. Such experimental exhibitions are intended to create greater awareness and spur better dialogue around hot topics, while they are still fresh in people’s minds.

The museum will continue to rely, as it has in the past, on community members, including freelance community journalists, members of the Asian American Journalists Association, and students, who will record and transcribe interviews and write exhibition text. “In this troubling post-9/11 era, we’ve been driven to work even harder to promote healing and renewed tolerance,” says Cassie Chinn, the Wing Luke’s director of exhibitions and collections. “Exhibitions built on oral histories, with individuals sharing their experiences and viewpoints, enable people to reconnect and grow deeper in their understanding.”

The Pratt Museum, a small, community-based museum in Homer, Alaska, videotapes interviewees in cultural and natural contexts, such as at a family gathering or during a walk on the beach. These are more comfortable setting for the subject, yielding more spontaneous and genuine responses. “Our videographer calls it guerrilla filmmaking,” says Curator of Collections Betsy Webb. “We’ve even gotten to the point of not even asking specific questions. We say, ‘What is it that you want to talk about?’ And we let them talk. That’s been really effective.” The museum’s use of this open-ended style, Webb says, has enabled two Native groups, the Alutiiq Sugpiaq and Dena’ina Athabaskan, to talk about and document their deepest common concern: the loss of language.

For the Newseum (which closed its Arlington, Va., facility earlier this year and will reopen in 2006 in Washington, D.C.), gathering oral histories—interviews with journalists talking about their work—is a natural process. After all, says Chief of Design Bryan Sieling, “news is inherently intangible” and difficult to present simply through the display of objects.

“We’re creating an archive of videotaped interviews—200 hours to date—of what journalists do,” he continues. “They talk about the stories behind the news, ethics, and the ramifications of their reporting. Some of the stories are pretty horrific, especially those involving war.” The Newseum has completed a film about Sept. 11, 2001, which  includes footage of the news coverage as the event was unfolding, including outtakes that show journalists seeking cover as the towers collapsed or consoling one another. “We took the live footage and later interviewed   the photographers,” Sieling says, “to find out what was going through their heads during the event.”

In the year since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans have been exposed to a daily stream of diverse viewpoints, small and large, profound and commonplace. It seems that in this new time of heightened awareness and uncertainty, the major underpinnings in our society—the mass media and social, cultural, and educational institutions—are all promoting the importance of conversation, communication, and documentation.

According to Mary Marshall Clark, director of Columbia University’s Oral History Program, Sept. 11 “changed our consciousness about documentation” and affirmed the role of “subject as eyewitness.” Her program, with the support of a major grant from the National Science Foundation, has been interviewing 450 individuals to gather eyewitness accounts of the harrowing events. The plan, says Ron Grele, is to go back in stages and “see how individual and collective memory changes. Many of the 9/11 projects . . . are going out before people have had a chance to reflect and integrate it into their lives. Of course, the facts will be essentially the same. It’s what people make of the facts that’s interesting.”

Clark notes the strong correlation between artifacts (or memorabilia) and stories. “A woman from the Historical Society of New Jersey came to a meeting with us with a piece of the World Trade Center in her handbag,” she says. “One woman said, ‘I want to be interviewed about 9/11, but I want to find a place to put my burned boots first.’ I’m starting to see museums as the place from which 9/11 interviews should be done. I’m now beginning to think: ‘Where does it make sense to interview people? Where will the deposit of material have meaning for them? Where will they will have a connection to the history?’”

As Clark reflects on the proper home for oral histories, museum professionals are starting to think about where their oral histories should be housed after they’ve been used in exhibitions and programs. What happens to everything on the cutting-room floor? How should tapes and transcripts be preserved and stored? What is the role of the archivist? How can researchers and community members continue to have access to those materials?

Preservation is “a huge challenge,” says Marjorie Schwarzer, chair of the museum studies department at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, Calif. “Some of the early oral history was recorded on fragile audio cassette tapes. Then you have video, which eventually disintegrates. Every time you migrate the data to more advanced technologies, you have to maintain the machines to play them, too. What do you do with oral history? It’s not like a visual object. It’s oral. When you’re a museum and you’re collecting oral history, you have a responsibility to preserve it. How do you preserve it when you are so dependent on the ephemeral technology that was used to capture the information?”

Beyond the physical challenges, many archivists and those entrusted with the stewardship of artifact collections have debated whether the oral histories should even be in the archives. Many institutions shove the oral histories off into an “audio-visual library” or a “resource center.”

However, James E. Fogerty, head of acquisitions and the curatorial department at the Minnesota Historical Society, was an early proponent of oral history as a tool in archival development. In “Filling the Gap: Oral History in the Archives,” featured in the spring 1983 issue of American Archivist, he wrote: “A persuasive reason for developing oral history programs within archives may be found in the elitist bias built into most archival collections. The inarticulate, the uneducated, and those burdened with work beyond their strength are virtually unrepresented; and their stories are lost.” Despite oral history’s increasing popularity, Fogerty explained, it has remained underfunded, one reason for the “problems of quality control”that have “damaged its reputation as a reliable source of historical data. . . . Few are able to devote their time exclusively tooral history.”

In the August 2002 edition of Comma, the journal of the International Council on Archives, Fogerty restated the case for the “archivist as activist—a professional whose mission might include active participation in the creation of documentation.” Archivists, he wrote, can “greatly improve the administration of oral history projects” through their “knowledge of provenance, context, and of access and privacy concerns.” With the decreasing amount of “substantive information” in paper and electronic records, he added, “one must rely increasingly upon the use of oral history as a principal strategy in documentation.”

And several museums have committed to oral history gathering as a vital ongoing collection activity. The Pratt Museum, for example, has 275 taped interviews in its collection, each ranging from one to two hours. Meanwhile, each new project creates nearly 30 hours of recorded interviews, though only about 15 minutes are used in the final video production. “We’ve stopped transcribing because we’ve got so much material,” Webb says. “But we save all the raw material, and we duplicate it and distribute it to all villages or what we call ‘story communities.’ They get all the raw material as well as the finished product. They can do whatever they want with it; we feel in no way proprietary about it.”

Webb’s hope is that the Pratt’s oral history gatheringwill encourage community members to initiate their own projects. Several years ago, for example, Herman Moonin, Jr., an Alutiiq man, started an oral history project in his village of Port Graham after he participated in a museum-organized video collaboration between 35 Native beach harvesters and commercial fishermen.

For all their usefulness, creating good, usable oral histories is not as simple as it may sound. As Fogerty has pointed out, quality control is an issue. Who does the interviews? Is there time to train them? How do you gain the trust of the subjects? Who does the transcription? Who fact-checks the myriad details? Where do you find the bilingual interviewers to interview non-English-speakers? The whole process—oral history is, after all, a chain of activities—requires skill, tact, speed, accuracy, and patience, in just the right combination.

Fay Chew Matsuda, director of Museum of the Chinese in the Americas (MoCA), New York, was hired by that institution in 1989. One of the first exhibitions she worked on was “Both Sides of the Cloth,” an oral history-based project about women garment workers in New York’s Chinatown. “The research was hard,” she remembers. “In the late ’80s, the idea of sitting down with a worker was really difficult. They would say, ‘You want to talk to me? You want to record it?’” Eventually, she said, MoCA worked with both the union and bilingual interviewers to gain access to the women and their stories. When it came time for the installation, MoCA chose to use the voices of the women anonymously in the exhibit.

Kate Steinway, CHS’s deputy director of interpretation, says it was difficult to create an “interactive format” suitable for a family audience for “Finding a Place, Maintaining Ties,” the exhibition about Hartford’s West Indian immigrants. “Because oral histories are ultimately just words, the biggest challenge for us was how to turn those words into something for people to do,” she says. “The thing we didn’t want to do is what’s still done traditionally, which is simply put the quotes on the wall.” For example, Steinway says, because the interview subjects spoke poignantly about the difficulties of adjusting to the Connecticut climate, the museum created hands-on puzzles that allowed visitors to compare the very different plants, animals, and foods of the West Indies and Connecticut.

Some traditionalists blame oral histories, in part, for what they see as a headlong rush toward converting galleries into dumbed-down, gadget-filled entertainment spaces. But oral history supporters point out that the art of storytelling can take many forms. Sometimes the simple, old-fashioned ways have merit, and a few eloquent words on a text panel might be the most effective presentation of oral history.

“I have a healthy suspicion of high-tech presentations,” says Walter Schacht, a Seattle-based museum planner and architect. “Too often they spoon-feed information to the audience. When visitors participate by reading, thinking, and making personal judgments about the subject matter, they have a truly interactive experience.

“Over the last 10 years, we’ve heard people say, ‘We want high-tech, interactive exhibits; that is the magic solution.’ But multimedia exhibits are often like a television show,” says Schacht, “the ending is always the same, and the relationships are static. Artifacts, photographs, and labels continue to be effective in engaging people. They elicit multiple readings of the content. The experience of each visit is different. And exhibits can be changed over time, allowing the museum to present new information and interpretations.”

But Schacht makes it clear that he’s a big fan of first-person interviews. “I find oral histories to be very compelling. Multimedia formats work best when they deliver those kinds of first-hand accounts. I can sit in a room and listen all day long.”

No doubt, many others agree. People are always interested in hearing what others have to say—it’s how we learn, craft our own thinking, and create a personal framework for understanding the complex world around us. By embracing oral histories, museums send a signal that they are committed to the substance of people’s lives, not a bad thing as museums seek ways to become safe places for civic discourse.

“Oral history has helped make us rethink traditional notions of what happens out there on the floor—the interactions—and what sustains and nourishes our work,” says my colleague Cassie Chinn. “That’s great. All of us in the museum community need to link our artifacts back to the experiences of individuals and communities. Oral histories show us the way back.”

Ron Chew is executive director, Wing Luke Asian Museum, Seattle.