ABSTRACT
Preservation refers to the long-term care and protection of the content in archives. Applied to oral history, preservation should ensure that the spoken words in recorded interviews are available to users into the indefinite future, and lacking a recording, that the transcript will preserve the content of the interview on paper. Much preservation work requires technical expertise and expensive equipment, but certain principles require nothing more than common sense. These four preservation principles can be applied to any oral history collection. Sound recordings on any media are subject to obsolescence for two reasons: unavailability of playback equipment or recording media, and new standards or technologies which supersede the old. Commercial interests drive the built-in obsolescence of recording media, and the music industry introduces new recording devices like new car models. Preservation cannot be done once and forgotten. Digitization has many advantages as a preservation tool, and is unquestionably the wave of the future.
