Planning an oral history project: six steps before the first interview

An oral history project that starts with a microphone usually ends with a pile of pleasant, unfocused conversations. The Park Service's guide for its own historians says the work that matters happens before the first interview: deciding what you want to learn, what it will cost, who will do it and where the recordings will live.

The steps of designing an oral history project. NPS

Six steps

What it costs

Oral history is slow. One estimate puts a single interview — from background research and a pre-interview, through the interview and transcription, to the narrator's review of the transcript and deposit in an archive — at 30 to 60 hours of work. Transcription alone can reasonably be budgeted at $125 to $150 per hour of recording.

Plan, then bend

Every project changes on the way: budgets move, people come and go, new research raises new questions, and the list of narrators grows. A good plan is what lets you adjust without losing the thread.

An example mission statement

For the Park Service's centennial, the Association of National Park Rangers set out to record, transcribe, archive and share 50 interviews with people who shaped the agency in its second half-century, from retirees to recent hires. First priority went to long-serving employees who joined in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and led through decades of change — rapid growth of the park system, new laws that challenged how parks were managed, and a shift in who worked in and visited the parks. The recordings and transcripts go to the Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia and are already appearing in publications and online. The project also serves the agency directly: passing lessons to younger staff on relevance, stewardship and workforce development, and feeding leadership succession.

What makes it a good model: it says what, how many, who first and why, where the material goes, and who will use it.

Going further

The Park Service's series continues with choosing recording equipment, and has case studies on interviewing at an alumni reunion, designing a project to scale, writing a scope of work, and the rangers' association project. It also offers a spreadsheet for tracking each interview through recording, transcription and processing.

Outside guides:

• the Oral History Association's Principles and Best Practices, the professional standard in the United States;
• Baylor University Institute for Oral History, Introduction to Oral History;
• Michigan State University, Oral History in the Digital Age;
• in print: Donald Ritchie, Doing Oral History (3rd ed., 2014); Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan, The Oral History Manual (3rd ed., 2018); Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History (3rd ed., 2014), whose warning is the reason for all of the above — without careful preparation you get nothing but random conversations.

Sources

Written from "Designing a Project," part of the National Park Service series Oral History Project Process; a work of the United States government in the public domain.