Creating an Oral History Archive: Digital Opportunities and Ethical Issues

The delivery of primary sources-including oral history interviews-through searchable, online systems has revolutionised historical research over recent years. While the use of such digital technologies creates new opportunities, which can fundamentally change how historians interpret sources and how readers interact with those interpretations, it also adds complexities to existing ethical issues and creates new dilemmas for researchers, collection managers and archivists to consider. In this article, we explore the opportunities and ethical challenges of creating, delivering and archiving a large-scale oral history collection in an online digital environment by using the Australian Generations Oral History Project as a case study.