Doing Oral History on a Shoestring

There are four main areas that will be covered in this workshop. Each of these listed below are meant to be used by learners and folks interested in designing their own oral history project with little to no resources. These sections are their own dedicated pages that are found on this resource guide.

• Introduction: About the instructors & about you and your projects
• Interviewing Ethics & Best Practices: Building trust, preparing interview topics, and conducting an interview that follows project principles
• Recording Technologies: Zoom vs In-person & how to do both
• Project Components, Transcriptions, Access, and Archiving: All about your project: organizing it, making it usable, and keeping it safe

How We Will Learn Together

Learner Expectations

• Think about your organizational context
• Reach out to other learners in this workshop
• Be willing to share your experiences
• It is okay not to know everything. You are here to learn.
• Please ask the instructors questions at any point

Instructor Expectations

• Give you useful and practical information and guidance about how-to design and conduct and oral history project with minimum resources
• Fun, thought provoking, and engaging workshop
• Mix of instructor sharing and hands-on learning
• Please ask the instructors questions at any point

Within the introduction part of this workshop, we will participate in class discussion and dialogue within smaller groups.

Our aim for this activity is to:

• Orient yourself to other cultural organizations with oral history project ideas and interests
• Understand what you hope to achieve at the end of your project

The questions above are meant to guide you with identifying the intention, scope, resources, narrators, and what you need from this workshop to aim in your project being successful. It's great to do this on your own or with peers who will or potentially could be part of your oral history project.

Here's what you should do:

• Think about this questions on your own
• Try to answer all of them
• We will give you 10 minutes to reflect
• After reflection we'll discuss each question as a group for another 10 minutes.