Steven Sielaff
Senior Editor & Collections Manager and Senior Lecturer, Institute for Oral History, Associate Director of the Oral History Association
MA, Baylor University
BA, Baylor University
Steven Sielaff is Senior Editor & Collections Manager at the Baylor University Institute for Oral History in Waco, Texas. During the last ten years Steven has held positions at Baylor ranging from graduate assistant to senior lecturer, working on various web-based and multimedia projects, including For the Greater Good: Philanthropy in Waco, the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission's Texas Liberators & Survivors of Genocide projects, and War Comes to Waco, A WWI digital exhibit. Steven has also conducted many institutional oral histories, including series on both the Dr Pepper Museum and Baylor’s Mayborn Museum Complex, as well as a forty-interview series on the history of Baylor University.
In his supervisory role at Baylor Steven oversees every technical aspect of processing, preserving, and disseminating Baylor’s oral history collection of over 7000 interviews. In 2021 he initiated the integration of automated transcripts into the Institute’s workflow, which currently employs a local installation of OpenAI’s Whisper to generate content at the point of accession. He also directs the digitization of BUIOH's analog collection and spearheads the migration of transcripts and audio files to the institute's searchable online database powered by Quartex. In 2022, he launched the Texas Oral History Locator Database, or TOLD for short, a joint project of Baylor University and the Texas Oral History Association (TOHA). TOLD collects survey data from the oral history collection managers of Texas then displays it in a database that researchers can search to find primary source materials from across the state.
Steven is also currently Editor-in-Chief of TOHA’s annual journal, Sound Historian, as well as Managing Editor for H-OralHist, a community of over 4,000 scholars on the H-Net platform. Additionally, on January 1, 2023, Steven was named Associate Director of the Oral History Association, whose institutional headquarters is now housed at Baylor University.