Like many of the members of this list, I have dabbled on the arcane
arts of oral history, and I am keeping in locked drawers and aging
hard drives audios of interviews that might one day be collected and
cataloged and shared. That said, I think there are significant hurdles
to overcome before that happens. I did not collected those interviews
with much care to obtain informed consent for preservation and sharing
of the audios (I note that Ross Emmett has done it, and perhaps the
SCEME initiative will be able to overcome this problem). At a that
most basic level there is an opportunity for some instruction and
institutional support on the part of the societies. They could provide
researchers with consent formats and perhaps promote an effort at
collecting what is out there gathering dust.

I have also written on my experience with oral history, and I have
tried to make two points. First, in my research I have only winked at
oral history. All I have done are long interviews. Interviewing elites
is notoriously difficult, access is easily restricted and the power
balance between interviewer and interviewed is tipped on the side of
the latter. As such, i have found it difficult to follow the multiple
session, over several days, deeply personal mode outlined by Oral
historians and taught in the courses hosted by the British Library. In
fact, I found from the oral historians that there is very little in
terms of guidance for interviewing elites. (That has also something to
do with the origins of the oral history community and its relationship
with the study of folklore and social history from below.) Secondly, I
observe that historians of economists are more willing to listen and
reproduce the narratives of their informants, than are the social or
political historians. Those historians prefer to keep a greater
distance from their historical subjects. This closeness has led to
what Professor Weintraub has noted in a number of places: actor
testimonies circulating as evidence without much analysis, without
awareness for the performative purposes of storytelling or the tropes
that fill up these "lives", or for the cognitive structures that shape
memory and recollection. This to me suggests that the stories conveyed
in oral testimonies might be treated less as factual evidence of
relationships and reports of events past, but instead as artifacts of
a community and professional culture. (See here:
http://tmata.com/papers/hope07-radical_identity.pdf)

Tiago Mata