ABSTRACT
In 1995 Ron Grele, in a proposal to the Ninth International Oral History Conference in Göteborg, Sweden,1 writing from the perspective of the North American oral history movement with ‘its origins in archival practice’ which gave priority to archiving for the future rather than to immediate research efforts, sought to raise the ‘rarely discussed’ but ‘interesting theoretical and methodological problems’ which this posed. ‘How useful are documents produced by others?’ he asked; ‘how does one predict the needs of scholars far into the future?’
