The Scholarly Communication & Information Policy (SCIP) office is pleased to announce the release of our Oral History Agreement Toolkit—a collection of templates, guidance documents, and resources that we created to help institutions approach oral history agreements.
The Oral History Center participated in the process to help SCIP to develop this toolkit. These agreements were developed specifically to meet the legal requirements of UC Berkeley. For guidance on letters of consent and legal agreements more broadly, especially for independent oral historians, please consult the Oral History Association’s best practices.
Why We Created This Toolkit
Over the past two years, SCIP worked to improve oral history agreements in ways that we believe:
Resolve the “version of record” as between edited and unedited audio and transcripts
Ensure consistency in representations to narrators, by having an integrated agreement
Address privacy and defamation
Standardize terms
Define use and access rights by the institution in the event that narrators pass away or disengage after completing the interviews
Resolve ambiguities for downstream granting of usage permission and licenses by the institution
Generally speaking, past approaches to oral history agreements have often created an imbalance between narrators and institutions. Our new toolkit addresses this by:
Centering narrator agency and control over their stories and how they’re shared;
Improving rights administration for libraries and oral history programs;
Providing clear, accessible language to explain complex legal concepts; and
Creating flexibility through multiple agreement options that accommodate diverse needs.
SCIP created both of these documents as training materials we presented to the UC Berkeley Oral History Center, but we believe they may be adapted, repurposed, and improved upon by other institutions.
The “Talking Points for Conversations” document is really the leading tool here, and includes:
Agreement templates: Customizable templates covering a variety of narrator needs and signing scenarios (e.g. signing before the interview, signing after the interview, funded oral histories, deceased narrators, etc.);
Explanatory Materials: Detailed talking points to help oral historians explain each clause in plain language;
FAQs: Addressing common questions, including specific concerns for historically marginalized communities; and
Sample Scenarios: Real-world examples showing how the agreements work in practice.
Key Benefits for Narrators
The template agreements protect narrators by ensuring they:
Can review and correct transcripts before finalization
May withdraw participation at any point before final approval
Can restrict access to sensitive portions for specified time periods
Retain the right to use their own stories regardless of copyright decisions
Can request removal of identifying information about third parties
Have clarity about their rights and responsibilities
Enhancing Institutional Practice
For libraries and oral history programs, the toolkit helps:
Establish clear legal frameworks for rights management
Reduce risk related to third-party claims
Create flexible options for different interview scenarios and signing preferences
Provide consistent language for explaining agreements to narrators
Address complex situations like posthumous agreements and funded projects
Accommodating Narrator Requests for Modifications
A key principle underlying this toolkit is flexibility. The agreements can be modified to better reflect narrators’ comfort levels and preferences. If a narrator requests changes to the standard terms (additions, deletions, etc.), you can consider whether you are able to accommodate those requests.
In our case, we outline our own processes for:
Modifications: Changes requested before signing
Amendments: Changes requested after signing, including rights and embargo selections and substantive term modifications
Customization Is Expected and Encouraged
We recognize that institutions have diverse practices and needs. And we do not expect that these templates or materials will work for everyone!
In addition, institutions must make policy decisions even if they decide to utilize these materials. For instance, what range of embargo time periods are you willing to offer? Do you want to allow narrators to redact information once they’ve shared it? How do you wish to convey or encourage Creative Commons licensing options?
The toolkit is designed merely as a foundation—a starting point for important conversations about reforming oral history practices at your institution. We encourage programs to:
Review the materials with institutional stakeholders, including legal counsel
Adapt the templates to align with your specific circumstances and policies
Use the talking points as a basis for developing your own communication strategies
Consider the sample scenarios as illustrations rather than prescriptive examples
Getting Started
We invite you to explore these resources and consider how they might enhance administration of your oral history agreements. We believe the toolkit offers valuable perspectives on balancing ethical responsibilities to narrators with practical institutional needs.
As you begin to use these materials, we welcome your feedback at schol-comm@berkeley.edu. Your experiences and insights will help us continue to refine these resources to better serve the oral history community.
The Scholarly Communication & Information Policy (SCIP) office provides guidance on copyright, publishing, and information policy matters to support the research and teaching mission of our institution.
In association with the Reva and David Logan Photobook Symposium at the School of Journalism, the Bancroft Library is hosting a Photobook Pop-Up Exhibit, featuring selections from the Reva and David Logan Photobook Collection (The Bancroft), and photobook gifts from donor Richard Sun (Art History/Classics Library).
Artists featured:
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Claude Cahun, Robert Frank, Dorthea Lange, Miyako Ishiuchi, Graciela Iturbide, Dayanita Singh, Alfred Stieglitz, Francesca Woodman and many more.
Photobook Pop-Up Exhibit
Friday, April 11th 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
The Bancroft Library
UC Berkeley
Free and open to all
Hosted by Christine Hult-Lewis, Pictorial Curator, and Lynn Cunningham, Art Librarian
The library has set up a trial of a bibliographic database on Russian Imperial Era periodicals, which will run through the end of this month. The trial can be accessed here:
Upon accessing the database, one will see the landing page. A login button will be in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Please click on it, as no password is required. You will be able to test the database and assess its utility.
Please reach out to your Slavic Studies Librarian with your valuable feedback.
Russian Imperial Era Periodicals: a Bibliography and Reference Guide (ImPressDB) is a comprehensive research database of periodicals and serials from the time of the Russian Empire, published between 1702 and 1917. It includes publications from within the Russian Empire, across its diverse linguistic and cultural regions, and from some territories under its influence, including the Austrian Empire (Austria-Hungary), Germany, and other countries. The database also covers periodicals published by the empire’s diaspora in various parts of the world, including those by émigrés, political exiles, and immigrant communities, offering a broad, transnational perspective on the era’s printed media.
Originally part (from 1894) of the quarterly issues of the Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France (RHLF), and since 2002, it has been an annual volume published in special editions. It gathers together references of French and Francophone literatures from the 16th century to the present day. The BLF was first published by Armand Colin until 1997; then by the Presses Universitaires de France; and since 2017 by Classiques Garnier.
Since 1996, the BLF has been the result of the joint work of a team at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, who is in charge of the indexing, and the Société d’histoire littéraire de France. The digital publisher of the BLF, Classiques Garnier Numérique, ensures the technical management and updates of the database.
The BLF is updated daily, as soon as new publications are indexed. Thanks to this, it constitutes a unique tool for researchers, teachers, students, and all those who are seeking to inform themselves about French literature, writers, subjects or periods. More than 200,000 detailed records from 1998 to the present day are currently online, including 105,000+ book chapters; 75,000+ journal articles; and 28,000+ reviews.
In 1870, the Regents of the University of California system voted to admit women on the same basis as men. Since then, female members of the faculty, staff, and student body have been inextricable from the University of California’s achievements and legacy. This Women’s History Month, the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library would like to highlight interviews from female faculty members who achieved historic “firsts” at the University of California, Berkeley. The four Professors featured in this blog post were interviewed as a part of the Oral History Center’s Education and University of California, African American Faculty and Senior Administrators at Berkeley, and Women Political Leaders projects.
Herma Hill Kay teaching at Berkeley Law, c. 1970s. Image courtesy of Berkeley Law.
Herma Hill Kay was the second woman ever hired to UC Berkeley’s Law faculty in 1960, following the impending retirement of their first female professor, Barbara Armstrong. Kay taught at Berkeley Law for an astonishing fifty-seven years, during which the number of female faculty and students greatly increased as a direct result of her efforts. Germaine LaBerge, the interviewer for Kay’s oral history, recalls “Only fourteen women anywhere in the United States had become law professors before Professor Kay joined the faculty at Boalt Hall [now Berkeley Law].” In addition to her historic tenure, when Kay was “selected as Boalt’s first woman dean in 1992, she was adding to a long list of ‘firsts’ that, taken together, make an exceptional story” (pg. i).
Herma Hill Kay, image date not provided..
Kay devoted her career to furthering the rights of women, specifically pursuing cases concerning sex-based discrimination and California marital property laws. As a result, Kay contributed to the conception of the first no-fault divorce law in the United States. In her oral history, she attributed her passion for women’s rights to a firm belief in legal equality for all: “I’ve always felt very strongly—and this came from my father—that women ought to be free and conscious actors. They ought to determine their own role in this world. So I was very opposed to anything that would stand in the way of their self-realization. I feel the same way about racial equality. There shouldn’t be any barriers placed in front of anybody to do what that person wants to do and is able to do.” (Kay 2005, pg. 76) In addition to her academic achievements, Kay played a pivotal role in forming both the Berkeley Faculty Women’s Club in 1969 and the Boalt Hall’s Women’s Association. She passed away at the age of eighty-two in 2017, but her legacy and impact on the law community at UC Berkeley remains evident to this day.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, c. 1996. Photograph by Julian C.R. Okwu.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs began teaching at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare in 1979 and earned tenure as a full professor in 1986. Shortly after, in 1993, Gibbs earned an endowed appointment as the Zellerbach Family Fund Professor of Social Policy, Community Change and Practice—a position she held until her retirement in 2000. She became the first African American professor appointed to the position of endowed chair across the UC system. The Oral History Center interviewed Gibbs in 2003 and 2004 as a part of their African American Faculty and Senior Staff Oral History Project. Over the course of her career at the University, she contributed to several key dialogues in African American Studies. These included articles and books she wrote on “minority mental health, young Black men in America, and the O.J. Simpson and Rodney King cases” (pg. v). Gibbs also testified before the U.S. Congress concerning her research on young Black males.
Gibbs devoted her scholarly and personal pursuits to furthering justice and equality for several minority groups, which she detailed during her oral history: “So, this whole idea of all of the early influences which were around social justice from my family, my father and growing up in the church, have kind of really been a very, very deep influence on me in my work, coming back to that and looking at it in the last book that I did and even now things that I’m doing, the kinds of things I’m going to volunteer doing, it’s really coming back to civil rights, human rights, and women’s rights and how we can make our communities work better for minorities, poor people, the disadvantaged people and women. And that’s what I have done” (Gibbs 2010, pg. 424). Upon her retirement in late 2000, Gibbs earned the Berkeley Citation, the University’s highest honor awarded to individuals “whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields.”
As the first woman tenured by the UC Berkeley Anthropology department, Laura Nader had an extensive impact on the University’s history and culture. She joined the faculty in 1960, the same year Herma Hill Kay started at Berkeley Law. Nader published ten books and around 290 other publications over the course of her career. As an influential and popular professor at UC Berkeley, she taught thousands of undergraduate students and supervised more than one-hundred PhD students. She recounted one of these popular classes in her oral history interview: “I puzzled because I never really understood why do students love the course Controlling Processes so much? Why do they remember it? Like the woman who said, ‘I took a course from you ten years ago.’ And I said, ‘You remember it?’ And she said, ‘Yes, it was Controlling Processes.’ Why do they remember it? They don’t remember any courses from one semester to another; who taught it and whatever it is. Their memories are worse than seventy-five year olds. So it opens their eyes to something. But why are our eyes closed? We’re not looking at reality in this country and many people are saying this now.” (Nader 2014, pg. 88)
Nader also taught at several other prestigious universities across the country, such as Yale Law, Harvard Law, and Stanford. Her research explored the interactions of law, anthropology, and energy science, specifically in indigenous Mexican cultures and the Middle East. Nader served as an ambassador for both the UC Berkeley community and the field of anthropology more broadly. As a result of her contributions to law and anthropology, she received the Law and Society Association’s 1995 Kalven prize for distinguished research. Experts across disciplines have commended her theoretical and ethical approaches to her research questions.
Gloria Bowles (bottom left) at the first UC Berkeley Department of Women’s Studies graduation, 1980.
In the fall of 1976, Gloria Bowles taught the first cohort of students in the Women’s Studies department at UC Berkeley and served as its founding coordinator. She taught throughout the University of California system at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Davis for much of her career as a professor in Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies. She recalled, “In a sense, the women’s movement came to me through my students, because in one of those proposal meetings, they accepted my proposal for Comp Lit 40A, the undergraduate course. I had a wonderful group of women. Of course, these women were so excited to be reading women writers.” (Bowles 2021, page 16)
Gloria Bowles, c. 1987.
Bowles, like the other professors highlighted in this blog post, considered the Women’s Liberation Movement in conjunction with other Civil Rights movements taking place during the 20th century. “Feminist was not a word we used when we were undergraduates in Ann Arbor. I think we were more obsessed with civil rights. The women’s movement followed civil rights, and the Women’s Studies Program followed Ethnic Studies, and one movement came and another. I think probably thinking about civil rights causes you to think about your rights, or lack thereof—and of course, totally different, depending on your class and color. I think that I always thought about things like that, although I didn’t give them labels.” (Bowles 2021, page 17)
After her retirement from academia. Bowles established the Berkeley Women’s Studies Movement Archive at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Bowles influenced the Bay Area’s feminist culture and paved the way for generations of female scholars to come.
Conclusion
Herma Hill Kay, Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, Laura Nader, and Gloria Bowles all achieved historic milestones and paved the way for future generations of female students and faculty at UC Berkeley. Without their contributions, UC Berkeley would be drastically different from the community we know today. They are just four of the dozens of influential women faculty members that the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviewed. To find more fascinating oral histories like these, explore the Education and University of California and African American Faculty and Senior Administrators at Berkeley oral history projects. For additional information, explore the 150 Years of Women at Berkeley history project, which includes Oral Histories of Berkeley Women.
Read the full oral histories of these women:
Herma Hill Kay, “Herma Hill Kay: Professor, 1960-Present, and Dean, 1992-2000, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley,” interview by Germaine LaBerge in 2003, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2005.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, “Jewelle Taylor Gibbs,” interview by Leah McGarrigle in 2002, 2003 and 2004, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2010.
Laura Nader, “Laura Nader: A Life of Teaching, Investigation, Scholarship and Scope,” interview by Samuel Redman and Lisa Rubens in 2013, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2014.
Gloria Bowles, “Gloria Bowles: The Founding of Women’s Studies,” conducted by Amanda Tewes in 2021, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2021.
“Iconic Professor and Former Berkeley Law Dean Herma Hill Kay Dies at 82.” 2022. UC Berkeley Law. March 24, 2022. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/article/iconic-professor-former-berkeley-law-dean-herma-hill-kay-dies-82/.
“‘Something Has to Change’: Collection Explores Movement behind UC Berkeley’s Women’s Studies Program.” 2021. UC Berkeley Library. 2021. https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/womens-studies.
ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY CENTER
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. As a soft-money research unit of The Bancroft Library, the Oral History Center must raise outside funding to cover its operational costs for conducting, processing, and preserving its oral history work, including the salaries of its interviewers and staff, which are not covered by the university. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.
Date/Time: Tuesday, March 11, 2025, 11:00am–12:00pm Location: Zoom. RSVP.
If you’re looking to self-publish work of any length and want an easy-to-use tool that offers a high degree of customization, allows flexibility with publishing formats (EPUB, PDF), and provides web-hosting options, Pressbooks may be great for you. Pressbooks is often the tool of choice for academics creating digital books, open textbooks, and open educational resources, since you can license your materials for reuse however you desire. Learn why and how to use Pressbooks for publishing your original books or course materials. You’ll leave the workshop with a project already under way.
Many of us, alongside reading poetry and novels or travel narratives, want to know about the context in which the author lived. Who were their families? Did they have a specific person of whom they dreamed when they wrote about love? Understanding the author can give us a better understanding of their meaning, their focus, and their world.
Unsurprisingly, I’d recommend starting with what other scholars have written. If those books don’t exist, or I am after a deeper understanding, I would start looking into what I could sketch out about the author and then look for unpublished papers in archival collections or other repositories using search interfaces such as ArchiveGrid or ArchiveFinder.
The Case Study: Angelina Weld Grimké
Portrait of Angelina W. Grimké from Negro Poets and their Poems (1923) via Wikimedia. | Public Domain.
For the purposes of this exploration, I’m going to look at one of my many favorite poets: Angelina Weld Grimké (Wikipedia). This poet, born in 1880 in Boston, wrote poignant poems about life and love, many of which were published in the 1910s. They died in 1958 in New York City.
Based on that information, I expect Grimké to have possibly written and received letters to and from family and publishers; to maybe have kept account books or diaries; and possibly to appear in or have created family papers.
There are other kinds of sources that might exist for our purposes as well, but I’m sticking to these for now.
Looking for Unpublished Materials
Unpublished material such as letters is usually held by archives; historical societies/museums; estates; or family/friends. The latter two can be a harder reach, but the first two usually try to let researchers know what they hold. With that aim, many archives upload their finding aids (here’s information from Bancroft Library about what a finding aid is) into collective search interfaces like ArchiveGrid and ArchiveFinder. To find additional ways to search archival collections, take a look at the Library Resource Guide History: Locating Archives.
To use either of those two databases, I usually recommend writing out a list of possible permutations of the person’s name. “Angelina Weld Grimké” might written as such, but it also might appear as:
Angelina Grimké
Angelina Weld Grimke
Angelina Grimke
Some English language search interfaces are designed to ignore accents, and some will fail a search if the characters in a name do not precisely mirror whatever a finding aid says.
Searching ArchiveGrid
OCLC runs this platform and, as far as library search interfaces go, I like it well enough. Do be aware that it sits behind a paywall and you must be logged in with your institution to use it.
Example of ArchiveGrid Landing Page from February 2025
Once I have the initial search page up, I usually start my search with the full, formal name; in this case (Angelina Weld Grimké) without quotation marks and with the accent over the “e.”
In this case, I got two results, one of which was the “Weld-Grimké family papers.” When I use the link to the University of Michigan’s finding aid, however, I find out that the collection, substantial at 14 linear feet, focuses on Angelina Weld Grimké’s grandparents, one of whom was abolitionist Angelina Grimké.
Example of ArchiveGrid Search Results screen from February 2025
The second result, relating to scholar and poet Akasha Hull, is actually more on point as Hull wrote about Angelina Weld Grimké. Based on the collection listed in New York Public Library’s finding aid, however, material about Angelina Weld Grimké is likely to be sparse as the “Scope and arrangement” section note that the collection covers a significant number of topics and the “Detailed description” only mentions Grimké once.
At this point, I ran the other permutations of the name and didn’t get any other relevant collections. So, I move on to the next resource.
Using ArchiveFinder
ProQuest runs ArchiveFinder and I am not a big fan of their interface, largely because of the layout. The point and goal of the interface is much the same, but different archives/repositories subscribe and use different interfaces, which means I need to search both for a wider results list.
So, I start with the same name and search for (Angelina Weld Grimké).
Example of ArchiveFinder Search Results screen from February 2025
The results here are much more directly on topic. I still get the Michigan result for the Weld family papers at the top. The following results, however, are new and include a collection called “Grimké, Angelina Weld” AND “Angelina Weld Grimké papers, 1887-1958” both at Howard. A few of the other collections, including Fisk University’s “Negro collection” appear to hold potentially interesting information.
Reading a Relevant Finding Aid
In deciding which collections to focus on, I read the associated finding aids, focusing first on description and size. For Howard’s “Grimké, Angelina Weld” (finding aid) is 8 linear feet and includes drafts as well as published material.
Example of what unlabeled archival boxes can look like in 2025. | CC0
Given the highly-relevant description, I then skim the rest of the finding aid, which includes folder and box level description. That means Howard hasn’t recorded information about every piece of information in the box, but you can get a great sense of what’s there. For example, the description for Box 38, folder 15:
Series F Notebooks Box 38-15 French vocabulary exercises, writings of prose and poetry, and recipes
suggests that it contains some poetry along with other types of material. That might not give a clear sense of what poetry is in there or how it’s presented, but something of interest is there! Or, I think it will be. My personal, vague, castle-in-the-sky hope is that there will be poems about food scrawled on whatever recipe information is there.
If there are only one or two papers that are of interest, then I’d likely check the archive’s information about rights and reproductions. If they have options for digital copies, I might request the page or two.
In this case, there are hundreds of items associated with the collection. Most archives won’t copy that number of pages for staff and resource reasons. In consequence,
I would consider a visit to the archive and read their informational pages on the subject. In this case, Howard’s Moorland-Springarn Research Center page on the subject suggests writing to them before making a research appointment.
Additional Steps
There are several additional approaches to finding additional material about an author. For Grimké, I’d head to historical newspaper sets such as the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America.
I would also take a look for government records in Ancestry.com (public libraries often have subscriptions, for Berkeley see here), the National Records and Archives Association, as well as check historical association centers around where Grimké was born, lived, and died.
There is a lot one can do to find information. Whether one wants to take those steps often depends on your time, funding, and how relevant the information is to your research.
If I’m focused on one author, then I’d likely try to find out what’s out there. If I’m looking for 100 people, I wouldn’t do in-depth research into each but focus on specific types of information.
Let your literature librarian know if you’d like to talk about research strategies for you.
We are sad to announce the passing of george miller (his preference for lower-case spelling).
George entered the world of The Bancroft Library in 1997, shortly after his retirement and originally as a volunteer helping to process the records in the history of water rights and engineering in California. George had had a storied career in finance, bearing witness to and shaping some of the key developments in the US finance industry in the last half of the twentieth century. Most notable was his idea of passive investment in the form of an index fund, which would track a basket of top-performing stocks, premised on the notion that the growth of the market over time would beat active money managers. While at Bancroft, George also became captivated by the collection of oral histories produced by the Oral History Center. Over time, he began to make contributions to the archive by sponsoring oral histories with key figures in Bay Area politics, environmental activism, and journalism.
It was through this engagement with oral history that my predecessor Martin Meeker eventually persuaded George to do his own oral history. An important theme of George’s oral history is his philanthropic calling, which he described as “graduating from his day job … to more productive things.” A great feature of a life history is that one gets a sense of when values or passions took root. Early on, George developed a sense of duty, which led to a distinguished vocation as a philanthropist to institutions and causes dear to him, repaying the opportunities he was given, not just to his almae matres, UPenn and Cal, but to his community, to young students, to his city, his state, and to the world.
George was known for the pithy sayings that his friends and family called GAMOs – “george a. miller observations.” Underlying many of them was a pragmatic outlook on life, for example, “time is like money; you can only spend it once.” He took one of his father’s aphorisms to heart throughout his life as well, “There’s nothing sadder than something done well that shouldn’t be done at all.” Taking great care to identify what was worth fighting for, he was humble about his ability to bring about change. Musing on this, he proposed his own obituary: “He lived. He cared. He tried. Then he gave up.” But this is someone who spent thirty-five years finding a way to derive steady revenue from the chaos of the market. He invested where he thought he could have an impact. He cared and tried enough to build a credit union in Vietnam from the ground up to 160,000 members, fund the education of hundreds of students at UC Berkeley, make improvements to small-claims courts across the country, support environmental organizations, help revive the Market Street Railway, and secure the future of a beloved bar and grill in San Francisco, to name just a few of his accomplishments.
His friends called George “a piece of work.” He made a cheeky, no-nonsense difference in the world, a difference that we at The Bancroft Library and the Oral History Center have felt deeply and will miss.
