How the National Park Service Uses Oral History

Once a park or program has recorded oral history interviews full of rich information and with good sound, how can these new primary sources be shared? This page draws on the National Park Service's guidance in its series on the oral history process.

Why the National Park Service records oral history

• To document the people and events it commemorates — among them Civilian Conservation Corps alumni; the families, friends and neighbors of former presidents; immigrants who came through Ellis Island; World War II veterans and home-front workers; Japanese Americans incarcerated during the war; foot soldiers and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement; Native elders in Alaska; members of tribes whose homelands became national parks; and young adults who joined Job Corps, a 1960s anti-poverty program hosted by some parks.
• To capture multiple perspectives and information missing from written archives.
• To bring history alive in interpretive programs and exhibits.
• To inform management decisions through historic resource studies, cultural landscape reports and administrative histories.
• To reach new audiences online.
• To record the history of parks and of the agency by interviewing long-time employees.

Ways to share interviews

Edited narratives

Editing a transcript into a narrative is harder than it looks, but it is an effective way to share the key parts of an interview.

Audio productions

The Park History Program's early audio pieces were made by interns with basic editing skills and posted to SoundCloud; each featured one narrator, with little host commentary or music. With a $10,000 grant, the program hired professional podcast producers for a series, A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service — eight episodes with scripts, edited interview excerpts, a musical theme and interludes, each able to stand alone but also working together.

Museum exhibits

Interview excerpts, as text, audio or video, can enrich exhibits:

• At Manzanar National Historic Site, an extensive oral history collection was central to the award-winning Barracks Exhibit, where formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans and their families and peers could speak openly about their wartime experiences — often a life-changing opportunity.
• At Andersonville National Historic Site, home of the National Prisoner of War Museum, staff have recorded more than a thousand interviews with former prisoners of war, civilians interned in the Pacific during World War II, and POWs' families. Excerpts appear in exhibits on capture, living conditions, communications, those who wait, privation, morale and relationships, and escape and freedom.
• At Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, some 850 interviews recorded in 2001–2005 supported development of the Alabama park and rehabilitation of its buildings. They captured the first African American military aviators, who trained at segregated facilities at Moton Field in World War II, along with the military and civilian staff who kept them flying and the wives who lived at Tuskegee during training. Visitors can hear their stories in their own voices.

Websites

Online exhibits reach wide audiences, and university partners often provide the needed digital storage. Parks in Alaska have worked with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Project Jukebox, which since 1988 has pioneered online exhibits combining oral history audio with transcripts, photographs, maps and text.

Administrative histories

Interviews with key park and program staff are often central to research for administrative histories. For an administrative history of the National Heritage Areas, Antoinette Condo interviewed some 60 people who built and sustained the program; because narrators signed legal release forms and she prepared the interviews for deposit at the National Park Service History Collection at Harpers Ferry Center, they will be useful for generations.

Sources

• National Park Service: "Using Oral History," from the series Oral History Project Process.