In recent months, the fragility of digital content has been highlighted by the actions of the Trump campaign, from scrubbing websites of content according to Trump’s executive orders to the complete shutdown of entire government websites. This mass-deletion of digital content (as well as the firing of multiple National Archives staff) signals a major threat to future generations’ access to national memory, historical research, and justice and accountability.

In the face of such archival silences (either intentional or incidental), historians and archivists can turn to oral history as a means of filling in the gaps. For more than a year, the Developing Humanitarian Medicine (DHM) project has been using oral history to conduct research and help achieve the remit of the Humanitarian Archive to “cover the work of individuals and small non-governmental organisations…working in international aid and war and natural disaster response, and the cultural artefacts relating to humanitarians…and archivally underrepresented views and events.” For example, Janelle and Maria’s extensive interviews with individuals involved in the Refugee Health Unit in Somalia in the 1980s is helping to reconstruct the narrative of one of the largest primary health care units, which has been largely overlooked by historians (you can read more about their work on the RHU here).

In capturing these interviews for their respective research outputs, the team is also building new archival collections – ‘archive making through oral history,’ as project lead Bertrand Taithe describes it – as the testimonies gathered will ultimately be preserved in the Humanitarian Archive, expanding the physical collection holdings with over 40 digital oral history recordings to date.

DHM’s project is not the only oral history work currently underway at HCRI. In addition to assisting the DHM team with processing and archiving their oral history interviews, I have been working on creating an oral history collection for the Researching the Impacts of Attacks on Healthcare (RIAH) project, which aims to improve understandings of the immediate, long-term and wider impacts of attacks in contexts affected by armed conflict. For the last year, I have been interviewing key individuals from the humanitarian healthcare sector to gain insight into their experiences of and perspectives on the issue of violence against the medical mission in a variety of forms (including hospital bombings, intentional supply chain disruptions, looting of medical facilities, verbal threats to staff, and physician complicity in torture). The participants interviewed – over 35 to date – have worked with a host of organisations and institutions, including the World Health Organization, International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins sans Frontières, Physicians for Human Rights, Johns Hopkins, Insecurity Insight and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and in contexts around the world, demonstrating the persistence and pervasiveness of violence against healthcare. Keep an eye out for future blog posts sharing some of the stories that have come out of these interviews (and the RIAH website for some excerpts)!

Oral history has the potential to fill in gaps in the archival narrative, but in the case of the DHM and RIAH oral history projects, these born-digital records require special care to ensure their successful capture, management, accessibility and long-term stability and security. Like earlier analogue recording techniques using audio or videotape, one must consider the quality of the recording, equipment, and future accessibility of the record formats being produced (think of how difficult it is to watch a VHS tape these days compared to 20 years ago). Recording with different equipment and platforms (remotely using Teams and Zoom; and in person with a handheld recorder) means varying levels of audio/video quality, file formats, and file sizes. While these files don’t degrade like tape can, they require stable storage and monitoring to ensure they are not corrupted, altered or deleted. As with traditional oral history collections, data protection and privacy are essential to gathering, storing and using the testimonies of participants. This involves finding a way to make the interviews accessible for users that prevents unauthorised access or reproduction, as well as software for transcription (a task that is extremely time consuming) that is secure, GDPR compliant, and that will not utilise our recordings for AI learning.

The ongoing work of the DHM and RIAH projects demonstrates the important role oral history plays in preserving narratives that might otherwise be lost to intentional erasure or archival silences in the physical records, as well as the reality of the aging of our humanitarian subjects. Modern communication technologies allow us to collapse distances and more easily capture these testimonies but these born-digital records require careful management to ensure their long-term security, integrity, and access. In doing so, we can safeguard these invaluable accounts and ensure the voices of humanitarian actors can inform history, policy, and justice efforts for future generations.