Bringing Life to History

The most critical part at the start of this project is to determine the goals and scope of your oral history project, and determining who will be involved.

1. If this is a group or community project rather than a personal one, create a working group of individuals interested in the project who will provide the guidelines and support for the various pieces of the project, and define the goal and scope of the project. Carefully decide on a projected budget, as there may be financial costs associated with the research, recording, and archiving, even if much of the work is by volunteers.

Goals:  What do you wish to accomplish with this project?  Who is the intended audience? How will it be made available? Do you plan to publish the interviews online or not, and will you make the media files available or just the transcripts?

Legal Issues: Interview content is protected by copyright law. In order to make the interviews available to the public for use, you will need to have signed release forms that assign the copyright to your institution/organization or that provide you with specific allowed uses that normally are retained by the copyright holders, who are the interview participants, both the interviewees and the interviewers. Should the copyright holders not be willing to sign over the copyright, then a Creative Commons license can be used to allow them to retain the copyright but provide your institution/organization with rights needed to make the contents available. 

Accessibility: While religious organizations are exempt from the legal requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that require oral histories to made accessible, you should consider making the oral histories accessible if you want to make them publicly available. For audio recordings, this means having a written transcription, and for video, it means it should be captioned although a written transcription would still allow access to the interview content.

Scope: Define the parameters of the project: is it finite or ongoing? Who will be interviewed, and what information will be collected?

2. Decide who will have the major responsibility for the oral history project. This may be a single individual or a group of people. d.

3. Develop a plan for executing the project, and a list of potential interviewees. The oral history project may be open-ended and ongoing, or you may decide to interview a specific group of people and conclude the project after a set time period or number of interviews..