Home

QUESTION: oral history repositories?

Submitted by Anonymooose on Wed, 09/19/2007 - 10:07am
question / pregunta: 

I'm conducting an oral history about the transformation of Wicca from a occult fascination into an officially-recognized, socio-political community. I have plenty of respondents and there is a wealth of literature on the history of modern Neo-pagan faith communities, but my question is- where can I deposit my research once it is completed?

I've searched for research depositories that focus on religious studies, but I'm still at a loss. None seem to have an open submission policy- they usually limit themselves to students or faculty at the University in question or have been closed.

Any ideas of where I can start searching? Even beyond a religious studies depository, is there some kind of research collection that focuses on counterculture groups or marginalized communities?

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Answers

Answer posted by: jim miller

Google gets 137 hits for the search: "oral history repositories", and limiting to “official ones, using site:gov (4 hits) and site:edu (8 hits) may cause you to miss some very promising .com or .org ones. "oral history" repositories religion site:edu gets 19,000+, so this will indeed be a tricky search. "oral history" repositories pagan site:edu (157 hits) might be worth a quick scan, but many will just mention oral history in passing – in a page about something quite different.

I suspect it will be better to try first looking in web directories. www.google.com/Top/Society/Religion_and_Spirituality/Pagan/ gets a number of possible categories of sites that potentially could give you leads to collections or repositories. For example, www.google.com/Top/Society/Religion_and_Spirituality/Pagan/Wicca/Organizations may have some active groups that may be interested.

To be sure, there is no getting around the need to “sell” your work and your ideas, just as scholars always have to impress a journal editor that their research is significant enough to be published in that journal – or just as important – related to the focus of the journal. The Web itself has responded to the needs of artists and scholars whose work is outside the current mainstream, and no doubt a few of today’s blogs and independent websites will be tomorrow’s classic masterworks. One way around the difficulty of breaking into the world of scholarly journals, or mass-market publishers, is to give copies of your work to friends or family – or sympathetic or interested researchers who may not have the clout to help your work find a home, but DO think it has merits and don’t want to see it lost to future researchers. This way you can buy time while waiting to break into the scholarly (or public) arena.

If you are affiliated with a college or university, even as an undergraduate, a well crafted body of research may well qualify you for inclusion in a digital repository. In the DC area, I don’t see anything that looks easy to access - the Washington Research Library Consortium Digital Library seems to be very “official” collections. Here at University of Maryland, we have DRUM (Digital Repository at U of MD), which has depositing guidelines It says it is limited to UM faculty, but in fact DRUM includes student’s dissertations, theses, and some technical reports.