The question of IRB for seminar 2 website projects (and other research in the seminar) is a subject that seminar 2 faculty discuss every year at the seminar workshops. And we’ll keep discussing! And (as social scientists know!) it’s not just our faculty, but pretty much everyone involved in work with oral history. The AHA, the Oral History Association, even (recently) the federal government have been grappling for several years now, at least, with whether, or when, or how much, oral history work is subject to IRB approval.

Since the subject is so complicated and unresolved, and various campuses (and disciplines) have such a wide range of approaches and rulings, our policy at Macaulay is and has been that this is a faculty decision, and that we won’t dictate any one central universal requirement. The only thing we do require (or rather, strongly urge) is that faculty make this a live issue to be discussed with students–so that they are aware of the issue and the arguments as something that is part of social science research. Some faculty ask all their students to complete the online CITI training. Others work carefully to craft disclosure statements and release forms. Others carefully anonymize all video (ITFs can help with that) to mask identities. Others do get IRB approval (expedited, or exempt, or whatever is best). Or some combination of those. But in each case, we’re mainly concerned that faculty make the decision but that the decision be transparent to students to help them understand the issue.

As for the ultimate website projects for the seminar, there, too, it’s a faculty decision just how public the work should be (and how that works with the need for IRB approval). We do, as a default position, encourage faculty to work towards the most public-facing presentation possible–as appropriate–because of the huge benefits to students from having their work available to a wider audience. But there are certainly degrees of public-facing. The sites can be open just to the public at large, or to the public at large but not indexed by search engines, or to just the Macaulay community, or to just the students and professor in the one particular section (that last option is one that, especially for an entire site, we would really discourage. But if that’s the only appropriate solution, then that’s the route to take). Even better, we would want to ask people (faculty and students alike) to think through the issue of privacy (openness or closedness) in a fine-grained and intentional way. Certain sections of the site can be private, if necessary, while other sections might be perfectly fine to have open. It’s not an all-or-nothing decision.

ITFs are primed to help with all of this–to devise technical solutions to achieve whatever different levels of openness will be best, to join discussions about the issues and implications, and to share information about what other sections of the seminar are doing–but that level of openness is not an ITF decision, or a central Macaulay decision, it’s something for the professor and the class to discuss, understand, and decide.

It’s far from a settled issue, and it’s definitely best for students to see and understand it that way–as part of understanding the specific disciplines’ (and interdisciplinary) methods of research and understanding.