If we're going to wait for a standard, we'll be waiting a long time, I think. It's constantly changing.
I don't know how you get around that, because those old pneumatic tapes or reel-to-reel or audio or micro-cassettes.... You know, analog was also very fragmented too.
What I would say is that there's a power in the spoken word. When you hear someone's voice--the motions, the rhythm--there's power there that's very hard to translate on the written page. If oral history's power is to put a face and a name to the past, and make it personal, make people care, you've got to think twice before you're sure of that emotion. Certainly the meaning of a story, when people are talking, it might be full of irony or sarcasm, but how do you translate that? Or the body language; how do you translate that? So the great thing about new media is that it's forcing us to author in sound and image, in all these different ways that were very difficult not so long ago.
My practice has transformed in the last 21 years. I had these big honking VHS cameras that weighed 40 pounds 21 years ago. Now I'm going in there with multiple things and we're doing incredible stuff.
So the possibilities are amazing. You're right, there are challenges, but there always were and there always will be, I guess.