Recording Oral History

With extensive examples from both historical and social science literature, this book is a practical guide to methods of recording oral history. The author provides suggestions on a range of techniques from developing a written interview guide and using tape recorders to asking probing questions during in-depth interviews and editing transcriptions. She also covers the ethical and legal issues involved in conducting life-history interviews and elaborates on three different types of oral history projects: community studies, biographies and family histories.

Presents chapters on interviewing skills, ethics, and interpresonal relationship.

"The recent development of digital audio and video recording technology has continued to alter the practice of oral history, making it even easier to produce and disseminate quality recordings. At the same time, digital technology has complicated the preservation of the recordings, past and present. This basic manual offers ... advice for setting up an oral history project, conducting interviews and using oral history for research, making video recordings, preserving oral history collections in archives and libraries, and teaching and presenting oral history"--

It was the place where blues, pop, and country merged into rock and roll--and the sounds that emerged from the tiny storefront at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis are still reverberating around the world nearly fifty years after they were made. On Sam Phillips's bright yellow Sun Records label spun a mind-bendingly eclectic body of music by Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, Junior Parker, Johnny Cash, and many others. And one day, a gawky nobody named Elvis Presley walked in.

For the past ten years, Nancy MacKay’s Curating Oral Histories (2006) has been the one-stop shop for librarians, curators, program administrators, and project managers who are involved in turning an oral history interview into a primary research document, available for use in a repository. In this new and greatly expanded edition, MacKay uses the life cycle model to map out an expanded concept of curation, beginning with planning an oral history project and ending with access and use. The book:-guides readers, step by step, on how to make the oral history “archive ready”;-offers strategies for archiving, preserving, and presenting interviews in a digital environment;-includes comprehensive updates on technology, legal and ethical issues, oral history on the Internet, cataloging, copyright, and backlogs.

Because oral history interviews are personal interactions between human beings, they rarely conform to a methodological ideal. These reflections from oral historians provide honest and rigorous analyses of actual oral history practice that address the complexities of a human-centered methodology.

"In this thorough guide to oral history theory, methods, and practice, Donald A. Ritchie, a prominent U.S. scholar in the field, synthesizes and builds on the extensive literature in manuals and fieldwork guides, to provide the first oral history handbook to address individual researchers as well as organized project teams (whether novices or veterans in the field), to cover videotaping as well as audio recording, and to support both teachers and archivists in their use of oral history records. Illustrating his guidelines with colorful examples from a wide range of fascinating projects, Ritchie offers clear, practical, and detailed advice on such issues as obtaining funding, staffing, and equipment; conducting interviews; publishing; videotaping; preserving materials; teaching oral history; and using oral histories in museums, on radio, in therapy, and in interactive video. Throughout, Ritchie stimulates researchers to consider and focus on the unique aspects of their individual projects as well as the special rewards and results of the recordings they make." "As he states at the outset, Ritchie's emphasis is on doing. His definitive guide provides all the practical advice and explanations contemporary oral historians require to turn their ideas and goals into action, and to create recordings that illuminate human experience for generations to come."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In many western countries, judicial decisions are based on “black letter law” – text-based, well-established law. Within this tradition, testimony based on what witnesses have heard from others, known as hearsay, cannot be considered as legitimate evidence. This interdiction, however, presents significant difficulties for Aboriginal plaintiffs who rely on oral rather than written accounts for knowledge transmission. This important book breaks new ground by asking how oral histories might be incorporated into the existing court system. Through compelling analysis of Aboriginal, legal, and anthropological concepts of fact and evidence, Oral History on Trial traces the long trajectory of oral history from community to court, and offers a sophisticated critique of the Crown’s use of Aboriginal materials in key cases. A bold intervention in legal and anthropological scholarship, this book is a timely consideration of an urgent issue facing Indigenous communities worldwide and the courts hearing their cases.