Oral History Donations
Due to a high amount of donations being offered to the Museum of Croydon and Croydon Archives, we have created this page to guide you through the donation process.
Starting the Project
Capturing the audio recordings of Croydon’s diverse community is important work. We encourage all organisations applying for funding to include the archiving, preservation, and donation process within their budget. This will ensure that your project can be preserved for future generations. If your funding is dependent on archiving and preserving the material within our collections, you must contact us at museum@croydon.gov.uk before your application is submitted.
Recording oral histories is a rich and rewarding experience, but there are many things to think about before you start. This can include training for taking interviews, choosing the right recording media to copyright and data protection issues.
The Oral History Society offers training and advice for taking oral histories.
This includes, how to include archiving in the workflow of your oral history project.
Donations must be in line with our Collecting Development policy and procedures.
Step 1: Offer of donation
Complete the form below with the number of items being offered and project description.
Thank you for your kind offer of donation. Please email museum@croydon.gov.uk with any questions.
At this stage, your offer of donation has been accepted. Thank you!
We will ask for the following to be completed and sent to us:
Completed transfer of title form
Completed oral history listing (see template).
Full description of project (1 page)
Full transcriptions
Copyright and consent permission forms for interviewees / interviewers (or alternative forms of permissions, these are to be agreed with Museum in advance)
Any other information
How to donate oral histories
Step 4: Transfer Files
Step 2: Project appraisal
If your project description fits in with the Museum’s collecting policy, we will ask you to complete and email a full listing, using our template below. We will send you our transfer of title form at this stage.
Please do not complete the template if you are not content with terms of transfer and/or you do not have copyright / consent forms that can be transferred with the donations.
Step 5: Transfer Audio
We accept oral history recordings in the following digital format:
MP3
WAV
Donating both formats is ideal as WAV has better quality and MP3 version is smaller and can be used for easier transfer / access in future.
We require all digital donations to be sent online, accompanied by physical hard copies which will be kept as back up copies in storage.
Physical hard copies in the format of:
CD ROM
External Hard-drive
CD ROM and external hard-drives are not ideal forms of primary storage, due to deterioration. Therefore they will be kept as back-ups, not master copies.
Alternative formats are to be agreed with Museum in advance.
Step 3: Listing appraisal
The Museum team will then appraise the full listing, making decisions on acceptance. If a project includes a large amount of audio files the Museum team may not have the staff or resource to appraise at this stage. This could mean items will be accepted by the museum for review, accession and/or disposal at a later date.
The Museum does not have budget assigned to the preservation and access of new digital donations. This includes back-up files, conversion of files and storage.
More Info:
Click below to see frequently asked questions:
Oral History guidance and examples: