If nothing else, we hope that this guide will be helpful to you as you think about how to approach your oral history project. If there are aspects of what is presented here that are unclear or insufficiently detailed, please email us at scarc@oregonstate.edu and we’ll be happy to assist further.

Beyond this, if your interviewing project fits within our collection development parameters, there is a very real possibility that we will be able to serve as an archival repository for the content that you create. If you think your work is a good fit for us, send us an email and, after discussing it internally, we will respond as soon as possible. Please know that, to be accepted for deposit, your project would need to fit into one or more of our collecting areas: 

• OSU history
• Multicultural communities of Oregon
• History of science
• Natural resources in the Pacific Northwest
• Hops and brewing history

If your materials do match well with our collecting mission, we will commit to preserving your content and providing access to it through archival description. SCARC is home to over fifty oral history collections and, if accepted, your materials would either be added to an existing collection or described in a finding aid of their own. Here is an example of a finding aid that we wrote for an oral history collection that was not created by SCARC.

In addition to archival description, a major emphasis for the SCARC Oral History Program is to provide online access to contextualized oral history content through portals like this one. We cannot guarantee that your content will be released in this way. That said, unless restricted from doing so, we will reserve the right to post content as an individual item or aggregated set in OSU MediaSpace and/or as a fully contextualized digital object.

At minimum, we need the following from any external partner depositing content with us:

• Interview media - usually born digital video or audio files, and preferably raw files in addition to any edited or post-produced derivatives that you may have created. These files can be transferred to SCARC using cloud solutions like Google Drive, Box or WeTransfer, or in person through the handoff of physical media, such as a USB flash drive.
• Signed permissions forms.
• A copy of your project spreadsheet, or other documentation indicating names of narrators and interviewers, dates of interviews, and their locations. Any additional background documentation of your project and your narrators will be very helpful as well.
• Abstracts and Biographical Sketches if you have them.