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Oral History Interviewing Methods & Project Management: Other Resources

SCARC Oral History Resources

Doing Oral History on a Shoestring
Developed collaboratively with the University of Oregon, this detailed resource provides guidance to cultural heritage organizations seeking practical skills for developing low cost oral history projects.

SCARC Oral History Program Homepage
A great starting point for learning more about mission and activities, and for accessing the thousands of hours of interviews that we have contextualized and published online.

Finding Aids for SCARC Oral History Collections
Click through to any of these guides to see what a fully processed oral history collection looks like from the archival perspective. Many of these finding aids are routinely updated as new interviews are completed.

SCARC Oral History Online
A hyperlinked alphabetical listing of all the narrators whose oral history interviews have been contextualized and made available online by the SCARC Oral History Program. This is the perfect gateway to begin conducting research in SCARC's ever-expanding network of online oral history content.

Oregon State University Sesquicentennial Oral History Project
The largest oral history project in school history, the "OH 150" project includes more than four-hundred hours worth of interviews with alumni, faculty, staff, current students and university supporters. Every college at OSU is represented within the collection as are alumni from every decade between the 1930s and the 2010s.

The Voices Initiative
A collection of thematic web exhibits that use both transcripts and interview indexes to enhance access to oral history content. Examples include:

Principles and Best Practices for Oral History

The Oral History Association "encourages individuals and institutions involved with the creation and preservation of oral histories to uphold certain principles, professional and technical standards, and obligations. These include commitments to the narrators, to standards of scholarship for history and related disciplines, and to the preservation of the interviews and related materials for current and future users."

Oral History in the Digital Age: The transition into a digital world, and the flexibility it brings, has changed the costs of doing oral history, standards of practice and scholarship, and the vehicles for access. This website offers guidance on issues of video, digitization, preservation, and intellectual property.

Organizations

The Oral History Association, established in 1966, brings together people interested in oral history. The OHA has an international membership of local historians, librarians and archivists, students, journalists, teachers, and scholars from many fields. 

The International Oral History Association is a professional association that provides a forum for oral historians around the world. IOHA encourages research that uses oral history techniques to promote the development of standards and principles for individual people, institutions, and agencies that collect and preserve historical information gathered through oral histories. IOHA seeks to foster a better understanding of the democratic nature and value of oral history worldwide.

Oral History Listserv (H-Oralhist) is a network for scholars and professionals active in studies related to oral history. It is affiliated with the Oral History Association.

Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change is an emerging and dynamic network of oral historians, activists, cultural workers, community organizers, and documentary artists.

Journals

The Oral History Review is published by the Oral History Association. It is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public.

Words and Silences is the official on-line journal of the International Oral History Association. It is a peer-reviewed publication and forum for oral historians from a wide range of disciplines and a means for the professional community to share projects and current trends in oral history.

How to Cite an Oral History Interview

Here are some tips on three different approaches to citing an oral history interview that has been deposited in an archive. The three approaches represent the standards put forth by the following formats: APA, Chicago and MLA.

APA

Structure:    

Author. (Year, Month Day). Title of material. [Description of material]. Name of Collection (Call number, Box number, File name or number, etc.). Name of Repository, Location.

Recorded Interview in an Archive

Example:

Smith, M. B. (1989, August 12). Interview by C. A. Kiesler [Tape recording]. President’s Oral History Project. American Psychological Association. APA Archives, Washington, DC.

Interview Transcription (no recording available)

Example:

Sparkman, C. F. (1973). An oral history with Dr. Colley F. Sparkman/Interviewer: Orley B. Caudill. Mississippi Oral History Program (Vol. 289), University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg.

Chicago

Unpublished Interview

Structure:

  • Name of person interviewed
  • Identifying information, if relevant
  • Name of interviewer
  • Place of interview (if known)
  • Date of interview (month, day, year, if known)
  • The word transcript or recording (if applicable)
  • Location of transcript or format of recording (if applicable)

Example:

Benjamin Spock, interview by Milton J. E. Senn, November 20, 1974, interview 67A, transcript, Senn Oral History Collection, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD.

MLA

Structure:

  1. Interviewee last name, first name
  2. Title of the interview (if any) In quotations if it is part of a publication, in italics if published independently. Use Interview without quotes or italics if there is no title
  3. Name of interviewer if known
  4. Publisher: Title of the database or website (italicized)
  5. Date of interview
  6. URL or DOI
  7. Date of access

Example:

Patton, Gwendolen M. “Gwendolyn M. Patton oral history interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier. in Montgomery, Alabama, 2011-06-01.” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/afc2010039_crhp0020/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.