The flaws in the Boston College oral history project are explored in a Times Higher Education article by Jon Marcus.
He argues that the project "calls for far more attention to the issues of informed consent for subjects and legal protections for researchers" and cites oral historians as saying that Boston College did not do a very good job of either. Marcus continues:
"The Belfast project was run not by historians but by Irish journalist and author Ed Moloney. Its 50 interviews were conducted between 2001 and 2006 by a former Irish Republican Army member and a former loyalist.
Boston College, which has extensive holdings of Irish literature, original manuscripts and other documents, agreed to house it. But the institution now says that it made a mistake in hiring the men.
Participants were told that the tapes would not be released until after their deaths, although affidavits submitted in the legal case show that the university warned Moloney that it would not be able to guarantee this if there was ever a court order directing it to release the materials.
An investigation by the Society of American Archivists has found that the researchers made promises of confidentiality that went further than university lawyers had advised."
Marcus accepts that Moloney disputes this interpretation of events by contending that the fault lay with the college because it prepared the contracts for interviewees to sign.
But the point, says Marcus, "is that there were cracks in the wall" which were easy for prosecutors to exploit when the police took legal action to obtain the interviews.
Despite the university struggling to quash the subpoenas, with the researchers also pursuing their own appeal, some documents were ultimately handed over, leading to Gerry Adams being held for four days before being released without charge.
Now Boston College has agreed to return the tapes to the interviewees, which Cliff Kuhn, executive director of the Oral History Association in the US, describes as unprecedented.
He says: "It's of limited utility to dump on Boston College. They've been through the wringer... But most people doing projects that involve criminal acts take precautions to make sure that promises are not made that can't be kept."
Now Boston College faces the prospect of being sued by its own oral history participants.
Source: Times Higher Education
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