Steven Sielaff

MA, Baylor University
BA, Baylor University

Steven Sielaff is Senior Editor & Collections Manager at the Baylor University Institute for Oral History in Waco, Texas. Steven has held titles at Baylor ranging from graduate assistant to his current rank of associate clinical professor. He has worked on many 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. He is currently conducting an oral history project for his church, St. Alban’s Episcopal Waco. In his supervisory role he oversees every technical aspect of processing, preserving, and disseminating Baylor’s oral history collection of over 8000 interviews. 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 AM Quartex.

Steven has co-authored many Oral History Association (OHA) best practices documents and is lead author of Oral History at a Distance, published for the Practicing Oral History series by Routledge Press in 2024. In 2022 he launched the Texas Oral History Locator Database (TOLD) to identify and promote the oral history collections of Texas. He is currently Editor-in-Chief and Book Review Editor of the Texas Oral History Association’s annual journal, Sound Historian, Managing Editor for the H-OralHist listserv, and Associate Director of OHA, whose institutional headquarters is currently housed at Baylor University. In 2024 he conceptualized and co-chaired OHA’s summer symposium, AI In OH: How New and Evolving Technologies Will Impact the Profession, which led him to become editor of his current volume, Artificial Intelligence Applications in Oral History: Reports from the Field, to be published Q1 2027 by Palgrave Macmillan.