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UWinnipeg’s Oral History Centre presents two unique workshops

The UWinnipeg Oral History Centre (OHC) is presenting two unique upcoming workshops. The first aims to help document and preserve history in the Winnipeg business community, and the second is to to assist Turtle Mountain Community College in preserving their recorded heritage. The OHC continues to be an innovative and dynamic component of the University’s H. Sanford Riley Centre for Canadian History

“We are excited to be hosting visitors from as far away as Toronto and North Dakota to share with them our knowledge of oral history and help them achieve academic excellence in their projects,” said Dr. Alexander Freund, Director, OHC. “Reaching out to diverse communities is integral to our vision of democratizing history. We are particularly excited that as Manitoba’s first ‘workbench’ of the global Sustainable Heritage Network, we have already had an impact on communities in Manitoba and beyond.”

The “Oral History and Business” workshop 
October 14, 2017, 9:00 am – 4:30 pm
Oral History Centre, Room 2B23, 2nd Floor, Bryce Hall

This workshop, generously sponsored by the Canadian Business History Association, will focus on the value of oral history as a record-keeping practice in corporate archives, and the usefulness of oral history in the study of business history. This full-day workshop will include best practices in oral history methods, including interviewing, record-keeping for the archives, ethics, legalities, and issues in access and use. Guests will also be invited to visit local museums and archives with the workshop group. Anyone can register and it is free. 

Representatives from Turtle Mountain Community College (Belcourt, ND) will be visiting the Oral History Centre in November for a workshop on the digitization of analogue media. Though a grant awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, TMCC and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa (Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation) will be undertaking a project that aims to convert approximately 150 cassette-taped interviews into digital audio files; the cassette taped interviews are primarily student interviews with community elders from the late 1980s. TMCC and the Turtle Mountain Tribe will also work with a local non-profit radio station to digitize a selection of the station’s audio reels, which hold a significant number of stories told by community elders.

Representatives from Turtle Mountain Community College will be visiting the Oral History Centre this November for a workshop on digitizing tape media. The workshop will address all aspects of the digitization processes for cassette tapes and reel-to-reel recordings, and aid the TMCC team in establishing best practices for digitization processes, helping to ensure the interviews with community elders will be preserved to archival standards and accessible to future generations. The Oral History Centre recognizes the importance of the Turtle Mountain Community College’s effort to digitize tape recorded audio materials of cultural and historical significance, and will be available to provide assistance as needed through the duration of the TMCC’s digitization initiative. 

For more information, please visit www.oralhistorycentre.ca or http://cbha-acha.ca/index.php/news.