Executive Secretary of Eleventh Meeting of Oral History announced:

Selecting Eight Papers; We Need Training in Compiling Oral History

Eleventh meeting of Oral History will be held on March 01, 2017

Maryam Asadi Jafari
Translated by Ruhollah Golmoradi

2017-2-20

Executive Secretary of Eleventh Meeting of Oral History titled "National Conference on Compiling Oral History", referring to few number of delivered papers to the secretariat, said: "eight articles will be presented at the conference. Compiling oral history is still issue of oral history practitioners."

Gholamreza Azizi, in an interview with http://oral-history.ir/ stated: "the final session of peer review of national conference on compiling oral history was held in the evening of February 11, 2017. We had received about 20 papers that after peer review, eight articles were selected. Despite being on the eve of Eleventh Meeting of National Conference of Oral History and the Second National Conference on Compilation, low number of articles shows that compiling oral history is still one of the main problems and issues of oral history practitioners. Unfortunately they have not addressed even on the subject through theoretical discussions."

He continued: "board of National Conference on Compiling Oral History, due to low number of papers, decided to hold the conference in two parts. Presenting papers will last since 8:30 a.m. to Zuhr Adhan in February 27, 2017. Then two workshops will be lectured by Abolfazl Hassan Abadi, Morteza Rasoulipoor and two other speakers. PhD Hassanabadi, a doctor of local history and is working in Astan Quds Razavi, and PhD Rasoulipoor, has more than 30 years of experience in the field of oral history and compiling it. The two next speakers are not determined. The workshops are held with a focus on compiling and developing in order to providing an opportunity to express their experiences, so the audience, learn compiling practically."

Executive Secretary of Eleventh Meeting of Oral History titled "National Conference on Compiling Oral History" suggested that "the conference is free, but favorers in order to participate in the workshops must sign up in website of National Library of Iran (http:// www.nlai.ir/ ). We will activate part of registration."

Azizi described situation of practitioners in field of oral history: "We are faced with two groups of people who are working in field of oral history. One group is people who are purportedly "oral practitioners" and the second group addresses scientific and theoretical issues of oral history. There are less people working in the second group. It means scholars who work not only as oral practitioners, but also work to explain theoretical discussions in this field. So the researchers are a few and a vacuum in this area is more conceived."

He emphasized: "If people, address theoretical issues academically – something that is expected – we would get regularly outcomes. This, of course, does not mean that oral practitioners are unable to document their experiences and theorize them; but on the other hand, only three books have been published about theoretical discussions of oral history."

Gholamreza Azizi stresses the necessity for greater working of academics in field of oral history and said: "University of Esfahan addressed the subject just one time and activated field of oral history that this itself somewhat caused protecting us academically. But according to the Cabinet act and its communique on command for extracting oral history of all organizations -according to standards of National Library of Iran- it is expected to be strengthened to some extent theoretical foundation of oral history."

Executive Secretary of Eleventh Meeting of Oral History titled "National Conference on Compiling Oral History", referring to the variety of oral history styles, said: "I'm not personally agree with a particular framework in developing oral history. Of course, this doesn't mean deconstructing. Ultimately, we must have a structure that has diversity within itself too. Selecting among these methods is depended on our view and purpose of oral history. If oral history interviews are seen as raw material or we work documented and intend to publish a well cited work, we must implement interview exactly that the book "Moonlight of Khayyen" is one of the samples. But if we regard oral history as novel subject and imagine persons and events as historical novel, it wouldn't be longer oral history and it would be just a historical novel based on oral history interview. Surely this is my personal opinion. If we want to determine that to what extent a work is based on oral history we must have precise definition of oral history."

Gholamreza Azizi continued: "we offer a definition of oral history and compiling in National Conference on Compiling oral history. Anyone can accept or reject it in term of his/her discernment. But we must define border line of historical novels and oral history. Compiling formats must be determined and everyone choose one of these methods based on his/her interests."

Finally he said: "Many interviewers who have conducted recording and implementation stages of interview, are now active in compiling too. We hope that the conference could respond some of their questions, and the comments would be available for audiences. Papers of the conference and its first time that had been held in Islamic Consultative Assembly, will be released as a Special Edition. But it will not be prepared for Eleventh Meeting and Second National Conference on Compiling Oral History. We will try to release it before next summer and as we would publish it, we will popularize it."

Eleventh Meeting of Oral History titled "National Conference on Compiling Oral History" will be started at the National Archives building of the National Library at the end of Street Shahid Hesari Jonobi, next to Martyr Keshavarz Stadium, at the east of Shahid Haghani Expressway, Tehran at 8:30 a.m. on February 27, 2017. It should be noted that it had been announced in previous news the meeting will be held on February 26, 2017, but according to a results of a meeting of Board on February 11, 2017, it was adjourned on February 27, 2017.