We had a great session in October at the Dorset History Centre. We learnt about the contents of the Dorset County archive. They literally have history in drawers; we saw the town charter and an Anglo Saxon legal document that included a curse if you broke the terms of the contract! The DYA archive and all our audio stories and photos will be stored here soon. In hundreds of years time researchers will be able to look back and learn about Dorset youth clubs and the young people who went to them and the people who helped run them 1943 - 2012.
We learnt about recording audio stories the right way. We will use WAVE files and not mpegs. Waveform Audio File Format or WAVE or more commonly know as WAV due it’s file extension is an uncompressed audio file so its larger and of better quality than an a MPEG file and the standard for recording interviews for archive. We can squash it into an MPEG file if we want to but it will be stored as the larger WAVE file because fashions change and the mpeg might go out of fashion like a cassette tape or compact disc. Archivists in training (like us!) need to think about these things!
We also learnt how to ask the right questions, how to make the interview not all about us! Plus we learned how to operate the digital oral history recorders which we can now borrow. We practised some interviews. Issy and Amy even interviewed Stuart Tyler who gave us the training. They have designed a questionnaire to measure attitudes of people working in the heritage industry towards that strange exotic species - young people! Stuart was great he is familiar with the species and likes working with them very much!
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