Training

Learn to record it properly the first time

Most oral history is recorded by people who are not archivists: a heritage society, a union local, a granddaughter with a phone. That is exactly as it should be. Our job is to make sure the result is usable in fifty years — audible, consented, and described well enough to find.

Flagship programme

Field School in Oral History Method

Four days in Halifax. Fourteen seats. You arrive with a subject you care about and leave with one finished, catalogue-ready interview in the collection — if the narrator agrees to deposit it.

Next cohort: 20–23 October 2026, 9:00–16:30 daily. Spring cohort 13–16 April 2027.
Fee: $685 · $545 for Practitioner and Institution members · $340 concession for students, retirees and volunteers of registered charities.
Included: All four days of instruction, a lending kit for the duration, lunch, the printed handbook, and transfer plus description of your one interview.
Eligibility: No prior experience or qualification required. Applicants must be 16 or older and name a subject and a likely narrator in the application.
Day one: Whose story, whose consent. Research, sampling, the release form, and what to do about painful material.
Day two: Microphones and rooms. Levels, placement, handling noise, and the thirty seconds of silence you must always record.
Day three: The interview itself. Supervised recording in the field, in pairs, with a real narrator. This is the long day.
Day four: Afterwards. File naming, metadata, summarising, transcription choices, and packaging a deposit we will accept.

You leave able to

Run a ninety-minute interview without steering it
Obtain and record informed consent that will hold up
Get clean, level audio in a kitchen with a fridge in it
Write item-level description to our published schema
Package files so another archive could take them tomorrow

Apply for October

Applications close six weeks before each cohort or when the fourteenth seat is taken. We hold two seats in every cohort for community groups that cannot pay; ask and it is yours, no means test.

Shorter formats

Three ways in that take less than a week

Free to Practitioner members · $25 otherwise

Method clinics

Ninety minutes online, second Wednesday of the month, 19:00 Atlantic. Bring one problem: a narrator who will not stop apologising, a hum you cannot find, a consent question with no clean answer. Twelve places, recorded for members who miss it.

Free · half a day · hosted regionally

Kit basics

For groups about to borrow a kit. Levels, placement, room noise, file naming and the release form, taught with the exact equipment you will be given. Ends with your loan booked. Next: Truro 12 September, Charlottetown 3 October, Corner Brook 24 October.

$400 · waived for grant-funded groups

Deposit readiness review

Three weeks of guided work on a collection you have already recorded. We audit a sample, identify what is missing, and give you a written plan to make the material depositable. Most groups discover the problem is paperwork, not audio.

Equipment lending

Twenty-two kits, free, anywhere in Atlantic Canada

Equipment should never be the reason an interview does not happen. Kits go out for three weeks at a time to any community group, school, heritage society, band office or family project in the region. There is no fee, no deposit and no equipment charge if something fails in normal use. Return shipping is prepaid both ways by our sponsors.

01
Handheld recorder with locked settings, so it cannot be left on the wrong format
02
Two lavalier microphones and a short shotgun with a table stand
03
Two 64 GB cards, batteries, and a wired headphone set
04
A laminated checklist and twenty printed release forms in English and French

Reserve a kit Read the loan terms

Kits are booked about five weeks ahead in spring and autumn. Practitioner and Institution members get first call on cancellations.

Calendar

Everything scheduled to March 2027

Long Play listening nights run on the first Thursday of every month at the Institute and never need booking. Everything else is listed below.

Programme calendar, 2026–2027
Date	Event	Place	Fee	Booking
3 Sep 2026	Long Play: The Weather Log	Halifax, listening room	Free	Walk in
12 Sep 2026	Kit basics	Truro, NS	Free	Register
3 Oct 2026	Kit basics	Charlottetown, PE	Free	Register
14 Oct 2026	Method clinic: consent after death	Online	$25 / free to members	Register
20–23 Oct 2026	Field School, autumn cohort	Halifax	$685	Apply
24 Oct 2026	Kit basics	Corner Brook, NL	Free	Register
5–6 Nov 2026	Sound Heritage Symposium	Halifax	$215 / $175 members	Register
11 Feb 2027	Method clinic: describing dialect	Online	$25 / free to members	Register
13–16 Apr 2027	Field School, spring cohort	Halifax	$685	Apply