How to Use This Guide
If you are holding this guide, chances are one of two things is true. Either you are about to conduct an oral history interview for the first time and want to do it well, or you are responsible for helping your organization build an oral history program and do not know where to begin. This guide is written for both of you.
It is organized the way a program actually unfolds: why this work matters, how to think about ethics before you ever hit record, how to plan a project instead of just an interview, how to prepare for a specific conversation, how to conduct it, what happens afterward, and how a single interview can grow into a lasting initiative. You do not need to read it start to finish before you begin. Part 4 and Part 5 are the two chapters most people reach for first, and that is fine. But we would encourage you to at least skim Part 2 on ethics before you record anyone, because the ideas there shape everything that follows.
A note on tone: oral history has a substantial body of academic literature, professional standards, and decades of institutional practice behind it. We have tried to translate that into plain language without flattening it. Where a term of art matters, we define it. Where a rule has real texture and exceptions, we try to show you the texture rather than hand you a false absolute.
This guide draws on decades of combined field experience from oral historians who have trained hundreds of first-time interviewers, at organizations ranging from state historical societies to universities to small community nonprofits. The scenarios and quotes throughout are the kinds of real situations that come up again and again in oral history training.
If you take one thing from this entire guide, let it be this: give yourself grace.
Everyone who has ever done this work has fumbled a recording, asked an awkward question, or missed a follow-up they wish they’d caught. That is the job. What matters is that you showed up, prepared, and cared enough to ask.
Why Oral History, and Why a Program
People hear “oral history” and often picture something between a podcast interview and a casual chat with grandma. It is related to both, but it is neither.
What Oral History Actually Is
The Oral History Association defines oral history as a method of gathering and preserving historical information through recorded interviews with participants in past events and ways of life. Two words in that definition do a lot of work: gathering and preserving. An oral history interview is not just a conversation that happens to get recorded. It is a conversation conducted with the deliberate intention of creating a primary source that will outlast the conversation itself, and preserving it so that intention is fulfilled.
A useful companion definition, from Donald Ritchie’s classic text Doing Oral History, describes an oral history interview as consisting of a well-prepared interviewer questioning an interviewee and recording their exchange. The word to notice there is “well-prepared.” Oral history is not a spontaneous chat. It is a structured, researched, intentional act of listening.
How Oral History Differs From Journalism and Everyday Conversation
This distinction comes up constantly, and it is worth being precise about it, because the differences change how you behave in the room.
A journalist typically has a specific set of facts they need in order to write an article, and the interview is usually a one-time event oriented toward the present. An oral historian is building a primary source oriented toward the present and the future. If the person you are interviewing wants to talk about something outside your original topic list, that is not a distraction from your job. It may be exactly your job, because you do not know who will use this record in twenty years or what they will be looking for.
A casual conversation, meanwhile, is reciprocal. Two people trade stories, opinions, and follow-up questions about each other. An oral history interview is intentionally lopsided. You are there to draw out their memory, not to share yours. This can feel unnatural, especially with people you know well, and we will come back to this directly in the section on interviewing family members.
Why This Matters: The Case for Doing This Work
Oral history is valuable for reasons that are easy to state and easy to underestimate.
- i
It creates primary sources that would otherwise never exist. The official written record, meeting minutes, newspaper archives, government documents, is necessarily incomplete. It tends to capture decisions and events, not the lived experience of the people who were there. Oral history captures the texture: what a place smelled like, what a decision felt like from the inside, what got left out of the meeting minutes because it seemed unimportant at the time but turned out to matter enormously later.
- ii
It empowers communities to tell their own stories, rather than having their history told about them by outsiders. A well-designed oral history program does not just extract stories from a community. It builds the capacity of that community to keep doing this work on its own.
- iii
It builds relationships. This is the part that surprises people who come to oral history from a purely academic or archival background. The process of asking someone to reflect deeply on their life, and genuinely listening to the answer, changes the relationship between the two people in the room. Family members who interview each other often report that the interview deepened their relationship as much as it captured any particular fact.
- iv
It requires presence, in a culture that makes presence hard to practice. Doing oral history well means being fully attentive to another person for forty five minutes to an hour without your phone, without planning your next question while they are still answering, without waiting for your turn to talk. That skill transfers to the rest of your life.
What “Done” Looks Like: Decide This Before You Start
Before you write a single question, answer this: what happens to this recording when the interview is over?
This sounds like a logistics question, but it is really the most important planning question you will ask, because the answer shapes your research, your question design, your consent process, and your equipment choices.
Consider the range of possible answers:
- An audio file, stored and made available to future researchers through an archive
- An audio and video file, with a transcript, indexed and searchable
- Source material for a podcast episode or documentary
- Content for a museum exhibit or digital exhibit panel
- Research material for a book, article, thesis, or dissertation
- A private family keepsake, never intended for public access
- A public-facing collection meant to be discoverable and shareable online
None of these is more legitimate than the others, but they are genuinely different projects. If you know from the start that you are building a podcast episode, you will interview differently than if you are building an archival record meant to sit untouched for fifty years until a future researcher needs it.
Deciding what done looks like also gives you a ready answer when your narrator, or your own board or funders, ask why you are doing this. Having that answer ready, before anyone asks, is itself a form of respect for the people you are about to interview.
Ethics and Responsibility
Before any discussion of equipment or technique, oral history asks something of you that other kinds of content creation do not: an explicit ethical commitment to the people whose stories you are collecting. This section lays out that commitment plainly, because it should shape every decision that follows.
You Are Working With Living People
Much of historical research is done on people who are no longer alive to be affected by how their story is told. Oral history is different. You are creating primary sources with human beings who are present, who will likely ask you what you plan to do with this material, and who deserve a real answer.
This has practical consequences. Your narrator (the standard term for the person being interviewed) may ask: What are you going to do with this? Will I get to see the transcript? Will this be public? Who will have access to it? You need real answers to these questions before you sit down to record, not because a form requires it, but because they are entitled to know what they are agreeing to.
Three Guiding Principles
Oral historians who train new interviewers tend to return to a small set of ideas again and again, because they cover most of the situations that come up in practice.
Say what you mean, mean what you say.
If you tell a narrator you will let them review the transcript, let them review the transcript. If you tell them the recording will be housed permanently in an archive, make sure that happens. Community-based projects in particular can suffer from a pattern where researchers or interviewers do the work, leave the community, and the promised follow-through never materializes. Trust in oral history programs is built interview by interview, and broken the same way.
Just because you can do something, does not mean you should.
This principle comes up most often around interviewing people on current, sensitive, or ongoing topics, political controversies, environmental crises, active grief. The question to ask yourself is: am I doing this for my benefit as the interviewer, or for the benefit of the narrator and their community? If you are interviewing someone who is currently living through a hard chapter, consider whether the interview serves them and the historical record, or just satisfies your curiosity or your project timeline.
Treat people like people, not projects.
It is easy, especially once you are managing multiple interviews, transcripts, and deadlines, to start thinking of narrators as line items: “I still need to get the Henderson interview transcribed.” Resist this. The person on the other side of the microphone is not a task. They are trusting you with something real.
Informed Consent, In Practice
Informed consent means your narrator understands, before they agree to participate, roughly what will happen to their words after the interview ends. This is different from, and more substantial than, simply getting a signature.
In practice, informed consent usually means telling your narrator, before or during the pre-interview:
- •That this interview is being recorded and preserved, not just a private conversation
- •Roughly where the recording will live (an archive, a specific organization’s collection, a private family file)
- •Who is likely to have access to it, now and in the future
- •That you cannot promise every possible future use, because oral history material often gets used in ways no one anticipated.
One narrator’s follow-up request, after a stroke, was for his speech therapist to access his old recording so she could hear what his voice sounded like before the stroke and help him work toward it. No interviewer would have thought to list that as a possible use in advance. This is normal, and it is one of the arguments for broad rather than narrow consent language.
The Release Form
The release form, sometimes called a deed of gift or legal release, is the document that formalizes consent. It matters more than its one-page length suggests, because without it, in most jurisdictions, no one owns the rights to use that oral history except the person whose voice is on it. That means every future use, by an archive, a researcher, a museum, a family member, would technically require going back and asking permission again.
A release form should typically address:
- •Who is granting rights (the narrator, and often the interviewer as well)
- •What is being granted (permission to preserve, and to use for stated purposes such as scholarly, educational, or personal use)
- •Where the material will be housed
- •Whether there are any restrictions, such as an embargo period, redacted sections, or restricted access for a certain number of years
- •Signatures from both narrator and interviewer, with a date
Programs differ on when the form gets signed. Some sign at the very start of the process, especially in short-form interviewing contexts where narrators move through quickly and there is a risk of losing them before a second meeting. Most programs prefer to sign at the end, once the narrator has had the chance to actually experience the interview and decide if there is anything they would like restricted or reconsidered. If you are doing multiple sessions with the same narrator, it is common to get a preliminary signature early to confirm the relationship, and finalize the form after the last session.
Electronic signatures are generally acceptable for this purpose. If your organization plans to donate materials to a formal archive, check with that archive about their specific release form requirements before you begin, since some institutions have particular language they require.
Subjectivity and Bias
No interviewer is a neutral, objective observer. This is not a flaw to be embarrassed about. It is a basic fact about being a human being asking another human being questions. What you can do is become aware of your own assumptions and actively work to keep your questions as neutrally framed as possible.
Here is a concrete example of the difference. Imagine interviewing women who worked in factories during World War Two, and who lost those jobs when the war ended and returning soldiers reclaimed the positions.
“How did you express your anger when you had to give up your job?”
That question assumes anger. If the narrator did not feel angry, but has spent enough time building rapport with you that they feel some obligation to give you what you seem to be looking for, you have just introduced a distortion into the historical record.
“How did you feel when the war ended and that changed?”
Let the narrator supply the emotion. Your job is to ask, not to lead.
Planning Your Program
A single interview is a worthwhile thing to do on its own. A program is a different undertaking; it is a repeatable, sustainable structure for doing many interviews well over time. This section is for anyone tasked with building that structure, whether for a historical society, a company, a school, or a family.
Scope: One Story or Many
The first planning decision is scope. Are you capturing a single person’s life story, or building a themed collection, several narrators interviewed around a shared topic, so their accounts can be triangulated against each other?
Themed, project-driven collections tend to produce richer historical material, because multiple perspectives on the same event or era let you see where memories agree, where they diverge, and where a single account might have been incomplete or mistaken. If you have the resources to plan a themed project rather than a single interview, it is usually worth the extra coordination.
Building a Project Plan
A workable oral history project plan, even a lightweight one for a small organization, should cover:
- Purpose and end product. Revisit “what does done look like” from Part 1. Write it down.
- Topic or theme. What era, event, community, or set of experiences are you trying to document?
- Narrator list. Who do you want to interview, and in what priority order? Note that some narrators are elderly or in declining health; if time is a factor, prioritize accordingly.
- Timeline. Interviews take longer to schedule and complete than people expect. Build in slack.
- Roles. Who does research, who conducts interviews, who manages transcription and file organization, who handles release forms and archiving?
- Budget realities. Even volunteer-driven programs have real costs: recording equipment or software, transcription time, storage, and staff or volunteer hours. Name these costs early rather than discovering them mid-project.
- A completion standard. What counts as a finished interview? Many programs find it useful to define a simple checklist (a signed release form, a reviewed transcript with names and key terms corrected, basic descriptive metadata) so that “done” means the same thing across every narrator and every volunteer.
Recruiting and Training Interviewers
If you are running anything beyond a single interview, you will likely be training other people, volunteers, students, staff, or community members, to conduct interviews on your behalf. A few things make this go well:
- •Short, hands-on training beats long, theoretical training. A few hours combining the ethics and methodology in this guide with practice interviews will get most people functional. Deep expertise comes with repetition, not with a longer manual.
- •Pair new interviewers with a review step. Have someone experienced spot-check the first interview or two: was the audio usable, were basic ethics followed, was the release form collected? Catching problems early saves a great deal of rework later.
- •Give people permission to make mistakes. New interviewers are often more anxious about “doing it wrong” than about the interview itself. Tell them directly, early, that everyone forgets to press record at least once, that verbal tics and imperfect questions are normal, and that showing up prepared and caring is what actually matters.
- •Build in a feedback loop. A short debrief after the first round of interviews, where interviewers can ask what tripped them up, catches problems (a confusing consent process, an equipment issue, a scheduling bottleneck) that are much easier to fix once than to explain individually to every future volunteer.
Setting Expectations and a Completion Standard
Programs that ask volunteers to complete an interview “at some point” tend to see interviews slip indefinitely. Programs that set a specific, generous but real deadline, and a clear, simple definition of what a completed interview includes, see meaningfully higher completion rates. A workable completion standard usually looks something like: one recorded interview of a narrator, a reviewed transcript with names and key proper nouns corrected, one supporting document or release form uploaded, and one short highlight or index note flagging a meaningful moment in the interview. None of that requires advanced technical skill. It does require someone deciding, in advance, exactly what “finished” means, and communicating it clearly.
Preparing for an Interview
This is the chapter most people open first, and for good reason: most of what makes an oral history interview succeed or fail happens before you ever press record.
Do Your Research First
Oral history is still history, and the work of the historian is the work of research. Before you sit down with a narrator, learn what you can about the topic, the era, the place, and the person.
Research happens in several places:
- •State and local historical societies, archives, and libraries. These are staffed by librarians and archivists whose job is to help you find primary and secondary sources. Do not hesitate to ask for help; it is what they are there for.
- •Museums and cultural centers, which often hold specialized collections relevant to a particular community or industry.
- •The internet, which has made an enormous amount of material accessible, though not all of it is well organized or contextualized. Treat digitized material with the same scrutiny you would apply to a physical archival document.
- •The narrator themselves, in the pre-interview (below), who can point you toward documents, photographs, or other sources you would not otherwise find.
The purpose of research is not trivia. It is question design. General questions produce general answers, and general answers are available anywhere. Specific, well-researched questions, ones that show you know something real about the person’s actual experience, produce the specific, textured answers that make oral history valuable in the first place.
Choosing a Narrator and a Topic
Sometimes the narrator chooses you: a family member, a friend, someone whose story you have wanted to capture for years. Sometimes you are working from a project list of narrators tied to a broader theme. Either way, before you approach someone, have a clear (if brief) sense of why this person, and why now.
Writing Good Questions
Good question design is a skill, and it rewards deliberate practice. A few structural ideas are worth internalizing.
Closed vs. open questions. A closed question has a short, factual answer: a date, a name, a yes or no. Closed questions are useful for gathering basic biographical facts (often better handled through a separate biographical intake form, described below, so they do not eat into interview time), but they are not what oral history is built on.
Four types of open questions, a useful framework from oral historians at UC Berkeley:
“What was it like to grow up in this town in the 1970s?”
Opens the door to memory broadly.
“Can you walk me through a typical day at that job?”
Asks for texture and detail about a specific, recurring experience.
“Historians have written about this event as a turning point for the community. I wonder if you could describe your memories of that time.”
Notice the structure here: statement first, question second, so the narrator hears context before the ask, and the last thing they hear is the actual question.
“What did you learn from being part of that effort?”
Invites the narrator to step back and offer perspective, not just recall.
End with an open door. Many experienced interviewers close every topic, and sometimes the whole interview, with some version of: “Is there anything more you’d like to say about that?” This single habit reliably surfaces material that a rigid question list would have missed.
The Pre-Interview
The pre-interview is a preparatory conversation, usually not recorded, that happens before the actual interview. It can happen anywhere both people are comfortable: over coffee, on the phone, in a video call, at the narrator’s kitchen table.
The pre-interview is where you:
- •Explain the project and why you believe this narrator’s story matters to it
- •Answer the narrator’s questions about the process, and be ready for practical ones like where the recording will be stored and who will have access
- •Show them the release form, so there are no surprises later
- •Optionally share your topics or question list. Seeing the questions in advance often prompts the narrator to remember additional material they want to make sure to cover
- •Confirm they are still comfortable proceeding, and if so, schedule the actual recorded interview
One important boundary: the pre-interview is not the place for the stories to start being told. It is a logistical and relational meeting, not the interview itself. If a narrator starts diving into a story during the pre-interview, it is fine to let a little of that happen naturally, but gently note that you would love to capture that once you are recording, so the story lives in the permanent record rather than being spent in an unrecorded conversation.
If circumstances only allow you a single meeting with a narrator you have never met, build in even a short informal window, ten or fifteen minutes, before you hit record, to build some rapport and learn a little about them first.
The Biographical Intake Form
A short biographical intake form, gathering basic factual information (full name, dates, places, family structure, career history) ahead of time, serves two purposes. It gives you material to build specific, researched questions from, and it keeps closed, fact-based questions out of the recorded interview itself, leaving more time for the open-ended material that actually constitutes oral history.
Equipment and Setting Up the Space
You do not need professional studio equipment to do this well, but a few basics make a meaningful difference.
- Recording device. A dedicated recorder, a smartphone, a tablet, or a web-based platform all work. What matters is that it is reliable and that you know how to use it before the interview begins, not while it is running.
- Power. Make sure your device is fully charged, and if you are not near an outlet, know how much recording time your battery realistically has left. There is nothing worse than losing power mid-interview.
- Microphones. If possible, use a microphone close to each speaker’s mouth, whether a lapel mic, a headset, or simply positioning a laptop or phone microphone closer to the person. The clearer the voice recording, the easier the later transcription and the more usable the historical record.
- Location. Choose a space with a door that closes, away from likely interruptions from family members, pets, or foot traffic. If you are recording in person, and using a laptop, position it so the built-in camera light is visible and you or the narrator can do a quick visual check that recording is active.
- Lighting. Avoid seating your narrator with a bright window or light source directly behind them, which will silhouette their face. Light from the front is far more flattering and useful if this recording will ever be shared publicly.
- Do a test. Record a minute or two at the start to confirm audio levels are good, and consider using the very first few minutes of the actual interview as a soft check-in before diving into substantive material.
Props and Memory Aids
Oral historians consistently report that physical or visual prompts, photographs, documents, objects, help unlock memories that a verbal question alone would not reach. If you know in advance that a narrator has relevant photographs or documents, ask in the pre-interview whether they might have those available, physically or on screen, during the interview itself.
A Quick Pre-Interview Checklist
- Research completed on the topic, era, and narrator
- Pre-interview conducted, and narrator still willing to proceed
- Release form reviewed with narrator, ready to sign
- Biographical intake form collected
- Question list drafted, specific to this narrator, not generic
- Recording device tested, fully charged, backup plan if power or connectivity fails
- Quiet, well-lit location confirmed
- Any relevant photographs or documents identified as potential props
Conducting the Interview
Preparation gets you to the door. What happens once you are in the room, or on the call, is where oral history actually happens.
Listening, Not Just Hearing
There is a real difference between hearing someone and listening to them. Hearing happens automatically; the sound reaches your ears whether you attend to it or not. Listening is active. It involves your ears, your memory of what has already been said, and your attention to what is not being said.
Two practical habits build this skill. First, silently repeat back to yourself, in your own head, roughly what the narrator just said. This keeps you anchored in the moment rather than drifting toward planning your next question. Second, treat every narrator the way you naturally treat the one or two people in your life whose stories you are always fully engaged by. That level of attention should be your baseline, not your exception.
An oral history interview should leave you a little mentally tired if you have done your job. That is a sign you were actually present, not a sign something went wrong.
Following Up: The Most Important Question Type
Almost without exception, the best question in any oral history interview is a follow-up question that was never on the prepared list. It emerges because you were listening closely enough to notice something: a detail that contradicted your research, an emotional shift, a passing mention that deserves more attention.
There is a well-known interview, held in an Idaho oral history archive, where a woman’s account of her decades of political activism only made full sense after her interviewer, following up on an offhand mention of her first husband, asked a gentle follow-up question. That single follow-up surfaced the fact that he had drowned, an event that was never on the original topic list, and that turned out to explain a defining motivation in the rest of her life. No prepared question list would have found that. Only listening, and a willingness to follow an unplanned thread, found it.
Handling Tangents
Narrators, especially those with rich, long lives, will frequently drift away from your intended topic. This is not a problem to be immediately corrected. It is, in fact, one of the more common and generative situations in oral history interviewing.
A useful rule of thumb: if you do not know the narrator well, let them continue until they reach a natural pause, then thank them for what they shared before gently steering back. Something as simple as, “That’s a wonderful story, thank you, I did want to come back to something you mentioned earlier,” is usually enough. Most narrators respond warmly to this, because human memory naturally wanders from one association to the next, and being redirected does not feel like a rebuke.
If you know the narrator well, and especially if they are family, it is usually fine to interject a little more directly and warmly: “This is great, but what we’re really trying to capture today is X.” The relationship can absorb a more direct redirection than a stranger’s might.
The harder judgment call is deciding whether a tangent has real value or not. There is no formula for this. Ask yourself whether what you are hearing connects, even loosely, to the history you are trying to document, whether for this specific project or for some plausible future use of this material. If it does, let it run longer. If a narrator has truly wandered into territory with no connection to the project or its likely audience, it is reasonable to redirect sooner. Trust your own judgment here; it improves with practice.
Working With Silence
Oral history interviews contain two very different kinds of silence, and confusing them is one of the most common mistakes new interviewers make.
Actual silence
Happens when a narrator pauses mid-thought: they have lost their train of thought, or they are deciding how to phrase something they are about to share. The instinct of many new interviewers is to fill this silence immediately. Resist it. Let the silence sit. If you are listening well, you will be able to help them find their way back (“You were just telling me about the last few days before your husband passed away”) rather than asking them to reconstruct where they left off themselves.
Perceived silence
Is different: it happens when your research strongly suggested a topic would come up, and it simply is not surfacing, even though your questions have created openings for it. Unless the narrator has told you directly they do not want to discuss something, the general guidance is to ask directly, rather than tiptoe around it.
A gentle framing device many interviewers use is inviting a third party into the room, rhetorically: “A future historian looking at this interview would probably ask me why I didn’t ask you about this, so I want to make sure I do.” This lets you ask a direct question while signaling that it comes from the responsibilities of the work, not personal curiosity.
There is no fixed rule for how long is too long to let actual silence sit. Interviewers who know a narrator well develop a feel for their particular rhythms; with a first-time narrator, err on the side of waiting slightly longer than feels comfortable before you speak again.
Handling Emotional Moments
Oral history interviews sometimes surface real grief, trauma, or strong emotion, even from narrators who did not expect that reaction themselves. When this happens:
- •Let the moment breathe. Do not rush to fill the silence or move to the next question.
- •If it feels appropriate, offer a pause. Ask directly: “Would you like to take a break?” Most recording platforms and devices allow you to pause and resume without losing what has already been captured.
- •Follow the narrator’s lead on whether to continue. Some narrators want to push through; others need to stop for the day.
- •Remember you are not a therapist, and you should not attempt to act like one. Being a caring, present human being, and letting the moment be about the narrator rather than about your discomfort, is what is asked of you here.
- •If the interview ends because of this, that is a legitimate and sometimes correct outcome. Give the narrator, and yourself, grace afterward.
Interviewing Family Members
Interviewing your own family carries a specific set of challenges that are worth naming directly, because they come up constantly.
Family narrators often already have a story they have told you, informally, many times. Part of your job is signaling that this interview is different: that you are approaching them, for this hour, as a historian rather than as a daughter, son, spouse, or grandchild, and that their answers are for a broader, more lasting record, not just for you personally. It sometimes helps to say this explicitly, and to repeat it if a family narrator starts giving you the abbreviated, “as you already know” version of a story rather than the full account a stranger would need.
One effective warm-up technique with family, before diving into deep or difficult territory, is inviting them to tell a story you already know well, one you might normally roll your eyes at from having heard it many times. Letting them tell a familiar, comfortable story first can ease both of you into the more structured rhythm of the interview.
It is also entirely appropriate, and often necessary, to end an interview with a family member without covering everything you hoped to, and to follow up later with a second conversation once you have both had time to reflect. Do not force everything into a single sitting simply because it is more convenient.
When Answers Stay Short
Sometimes, despite good preparation and good questions, a narrator simply gives brief, minimal answers. Before assuming you have done something wrong, try:
- •Ending every question, or every topic, with some version of “Can you tell me more about that?”
- •Being visibly curious and present; body language, even on a video call, communicates whether you are actually interested
- •Repeating back a word or phrase they used, in a questioning tone, to signal you want more on exactly that point
If none of this changes the pattern, it may simply be that this particular narrator, or this particular moment, is not going to produce the depth you hoped for. That is a real and acceptable outcome. It does not mean you did the preparation wrong. Some people are not comfortable being interviewed in the way you had hoped, and no amount of skillful follow-up changes that. Move on with grace, and consider whether a different format, or a later attempt, might work better.
A Practical Note on Interview Length
Most experienced interviewers find forty five minutes to sixty minutes per session to be a practical sweet spot. Beyond that, both the interviewer’s listening quality and the narrator’s energy for deep recall tend to decline. If there is more ground to cover, a follow-up session is almost always a better choice than pushing a single session past the point of diminishing returns.
After the Interview
The recording is not the end product. It is raw material. What you do with it in the days and weeks afterward determines whether this interview becomes a usable historical resource or simply a file that sits untouched.
The Recording Is the Primary Source
Whatever else you produce, a transcript, an index, a highlight clip, the audio or video recording itself remains the primary historical source. Transcripts and indexes exist to give you and future researchers intellectual control over that recording: an efficient way to find and understand what is in it without having to listen to every minute. If anything in a transcript seems unclear, unusual, or possibly incorrect, the right move is always to go back and listen to the recording itself to confirm it.
Reviewing the Transcript
Nearly every modern recording tool, including TheirStory and most other oral history and meeting platforms, can generate an automatic transcript with reasonable accuracy. That transcript is a starting point, not a finished product. A basic review pass should, at minimum:
- •Correct the narrator’s and interviewer’s names wherever they appear, since automated systems frequently misspell names on first pass
- •Check proper nouns throughout: place names, organizations, other people mentioned. These are the terms automated transcription is most likely to get wrong, and they are also the terms future researchers are most likely to search for
- •Confirm speaker attribution is correct, especially in passages with quick back-and-forth or overlapping speech, where automated systems are most prone to error
Most platforms that support this kind of editing also support a find-and-replace function similar to a word processor, which is useful when a name is misspelled consistently throughout a transcript.
There is a real debate in the field over how much to clean up verbal tics (“um,” “you know,” repeated words) in a transcript. Some programs keep them in almost entirely, on the theory that the transcript should be as faithful a recitation of the actual interview as possible, and that these verbal habits are part of an honest record of how a person spoke. Others remove them for readability, particularly when transcripts are meant for public-facing use. There is no single right answer; pick a standard for your program and apply it consistently, and consider keeping the first instance or two of a narrator’s particular verbal tic even if you trim the rest, just so a reader understands how that person actually spoke. Many programs also use bracketed editorial notes, such as [unclear], [pause], or [laughter], to flag moments where the transcript needs interpretive help from a future reader or listener.
Metadata, indexing, and highlight clips
Metadata: Making the Interview Findable
Metadata is the basic descriptive information attached to a recording: a title, a brief description, the names of everyone who participated, and a set of keywords. This sounds like a minor administrative step, but it is what makes the difference between an interview that a future researcher can actually find and one that gets lost in an unlabeled folder. At minimum, aim to capture a clear title, a short description of what the interview covers, the names of everyone present, and a handful of keywords describing the main subjects discussed.
Indexing: A Table of Contents for the Recording
An index is best understood as a table of contents for an interview, but instead of chapter numbers, it uses timestamps: a time code, paired with a short summary of what is being discussed at that point in the recording. Indexing matters because it allows the recording to be understood, and searched, using language that the narrator may never have actually used out loud. A narrator might spend two hours describing an experience of discrimination without ever using that word. An index entry can name what is happening in that passage even when the narrator’s own words did not. This gives future researchers, and you, a second way into the material, one based on meaning rather than only on exact wording.
Most modern oral history platforms, including TheirStory, can generate a first pass at this kind of index automatically, which you can then review and adjust, the same way you would review an automated transcript.
Highlight Clips
Long interviews are valuable as complete records, but a single striking passage, two or three minutes long, is often what actually gets shared, in a podcast, on social media, in a presentation, or in a museum exhibit. Most platforms that support oral history work, again including TheirStory, let you select a passage of transcript and generate a standalone clip from it without disturbing the original recording. Creating even one or two clips per interview, flagging the moments that felt most powerful or most representative of the narrator’s experience, makes an interview dramatically easier for other people, including your future self, to make use of later.
Deciding What to Make Public
Not every interview should be public, and not every public interview should be public in full. Consider a layered approach:
- •Some material may be appropriate for full public access
- •Some material may be appropriate to share only with the narrator’s family, or with a specific research community
- •Some material may need to remain restricted or embargoed for a period of time, particularly if it touches on living people other than the narrator, or on sensitive current events
Whatever you decide, this should have been part of the informed consent conversation in the pre-interview, not a surprise decided unilaterally afterward.
Exporting and Preserving Your Data
Regardless of what software or platform you use to record and manage interviews, make sure your organization’s material can be exported into standard, non-proprietary formats: audio and video files, text or Word transcripts, and closed-caption files (formats like SRT or VTT) for accessibility. This matters because oral history material is meant to be preserved far longer than any particular piece of software is likely to exist. A responsible program does not lock its most important asset, the interviews themselves, inside a single tool with no way out.
Growing and Sustaining a Program
A single successful interview proves the model works. Turning that into a lasting program is a different kind of effort, and it is where many well-intentioned initiatives quietly stall.
This chapter is deliberately shorter than the others; it draws less on established oral history methodology and more on patterns that tend to separate programs that last from programs that fade after an enthusiastic start.
From One Interview to an Initiative
Consider a simple maturity path rather than trying to build a fully staffed program on day one:
Pilot interview
One or two interviews, conducted by you or a small founding group, mainly to learn your own process and work out real logistics.
Small cohort
A handful of trained volunteers or staff, each completing one or two interviews, with a shared, simple completion standard and a light review process.
Sustained program
A repeatable cycle of recruiting narrators, training interviewers, and processing completed interviews, with clear ownership of the ongoing work rather than dependence on one founder’s personal bandwidth.
Most of the mistakes that stall programs happen in the jump from step two to step three.
Building Partnerships
Historical societies, schools, universities, libraries, and community organizations are natural partners for oral history work, and partnering early has real advantages: shared expertise, shared narrator networks, credibility with potential participants, and sometimes shared costs for training or equipment. If your organization is new to this work, look for an existing local or regional oral history initiative before building everything from scratch. Many state historical societies, for example, run oral history initiatives specifically designed to bring outside organizations into an existing infrastructure, offering training, technical support, and even hosting for the resulting collection.
Why Programs Stall, and How to Avoid It
A few patterns show up repeatedly:
- No clear completion standard. Without a specific, simple definition of “done,” interviews sit half-finished indefinitely.
- No deadline, or a deadline with no consequence. Open-ended timelines tend to produce open-ended delays. A generous but real deadline, communicated clearly, meaningfully improves completion rates.
- All the institutional knowledge in one person’s head. If only the founder knows how to review a transcript, manage a release form, or operate the recording tool, the program cannot outlast that person’s attention or tenure. Document your process, even informally, early.
- No plan for what happens to the material. A pile of completed but unprocessed interviews, sitting on someone’s laptop, is a common failure mode. Decide, before you start collecting more, how existing material will actually reach an archive, an exhibit, or a public collection.
- Treating training as a one-time event. Programs that revisit training periodically, and that build in even a short debrief after each round of new interviews, tend to catch and fix small process problems before they become larger ones.
None of these problems require elaborate solutions. They mostly require someone deciding, explicitly and in writing, what the process is, and then protecting that process from silently eroding as the initial enthusiasm of a launch fades into the ordinary busyness of ongoing work.
Appendices
Working material to adapt for your own program.
These are meant as prompts to adapt, not a script to read verbatim. Always tailor questions to the specific narrator and topic, based on your research.
Career and work life
- What was a typical day like when you were working at [place]?Copy
- How did you first get started in this line of work?Copy
- What changed most about that work over the years you did it?Copy
- Who taught you the most about how to do this job well?Copy
Family and personal history
- What do you remember most about the house or place you grew up in?Copy
- Who in your family had the biggest influence on the person you became?Copy
- What is a story your family tells often that you think is important to have on record?Copy
Community and place
- What was this community like when you first arrived, or when you were young?Copy
- How has this place changed the most over your lifetime?Copy
- Is there a person from this community whose story you think deserves more attention?Copy
Historical events and eras
- Where were you, and what were you doing, when [event] happened?Copy
- How did that event change daily life for you or your family?Copy
- Looking back, what do you think people misunderstand about that time?Copy
Closing and reflective questions
- Looking back on all of this, what do you feel most proud of?Copy
- What would you want someone listening to this fifty years from now to understand?Copy
- Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you think is important to include?Copy
This is a checklist of what a release form should generally address, not a legal template. Consult your organization’s legal counsel, or the requirements of any archive you plan to donate to, before finalizing your own form.
- Full names of narrator and interviewer
- A clear statement of what rights are being granted (permission to preserve and use the recording)
- The stated purposes of use (for example: scholarly, educational, and personal use)
- Where the material will be stored or archived
- Any restrictions: embargo periods, redacted sections, restricted access
- Signature lines and dates for both narrator and interviewer
- A note on how the narrator can request a copy or review the finished transcript, if your program offers that
Gather this basic information ahead of the recorded interview, so it does not consume interview time:
- Full name, and name at birth if different
- Date and place of birth
- Family structure: parents, siblings, spouse, children
- Education history
- Career or work history, in brief
- Places lived, in order
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