A copy of your narrator’s resume or vita will likely prove very helpful to your preparations, but probably even more important will be a pre-interview. The pre-interview can be conducted in person or over the phone or Zoom, and is meant to both improve your understanding of your narrator and continue to build bonds of trust. Be sure to emphasize that the pre-interview is not, in fact, the interview itself, and that everything that is shared during the pre-interview is off the record. While a pre-interview is not always logistically possible, if you are able to schedule one, use the time to test your assumptions about the narrator’s life, to provide a list of topics that you wish to explore during the formal interview, and to clarify any topics that the narrator does not wish to include in the recording. In certain cases, the pre-interview could be conducted right before the formal interview.

From your pre-interview and other research, try to create a timeline of your narrator’s life beforehand. As you do so, use your historical imagination to answer this question: how did my narrator arrive at this point in their life? From your position as the interviewer, you have the advantage of knowing how their story “ends” to date; part of your task is to document, chapter by chapter, how they arrived in their current circumstance. 

Reflect also on why you are interviewing this person and what they represent as a historical actor. In doing so, it will be paramount for you to try and place yourself in your narrator’s shoes, thinking in particular about the material and environmental circumstances that they may have encountered in their journey. As you do this, be mindful of the historical eras that they have experienced as well as any major events (be they local events or broader in scale) that they might be able to recount. Also try to avoid questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no. Your aim should be to ask questions that will elicit a detailed response.

Some other broad themes that we often include on our topic sheets are as follows: inspirations, personal evolution, careers, major achievements, observations on community, work-life balance, and change over time. Another tactic that you can use is to ask about a “typical day” from a particular era or setting in their lives; this approach will often elicit important details that are hard to get at through other lines of inquiry. Props including historic photographs or artifacts can also come in handy, should you need something to help jog your narrator’s memory. One subject that you might choose to avoid is family, unless you have already discussed it in a pre-interview and are sure that the narrator wishes to include it in their recording. 

Once you have developed your topic sheet, it is best practice to send it to your narrator well in advance so they have a good sense of what you hope to accomplish and can prepare accordingly. 

No matter how you intend to collect your interview - be it with a video recorder, an audio recorder or over Zoom - it is imperative that you know how to operate your equipment. Test it out several times prior to using it in the interview setting and, if at all possible, bring two recording devices to the interview itself – a primary recorder and a backup device. Born digital records are by nature very fragile and having two devices working for you will help to insure against catastrophic loss. SCARC usually uses a video camera as its primary recorder and a digital audio recorder as the secondary device, but for you a phone app can work perfectly well for backup purposes. 

Also be sure that you know where the files that you are creating will be stored. With many devices this will be on a piece of media, like an SD card. In other circumstances - especially Zoom - your files will likely be recorded to the cloud. (Here’s a helpful How-To resource on recording a Zoom meeting.) Be sure you know how to a) find your content and b) work with your content, including depositing a copy of your files with a repository like SCARC.