According to the Oral History Association, "Oral history is a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events. Oral history is both the oldest type of historical inquiry, predating the written word, and one of the most modern, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s and now using 21st-century digital technologies."
Oral histories are conducted with the intention of creating a primary resource for research on a particular historical person or event. These resources take the form of audio/video recordings and transcripts. Ultimately, these resources will be archived for perpetuity in multiple places such as online repositories and deep storage. Researchers will be able to access them for study and some will be used in online exhibits for the general public.
The interview is ideally one on one, as opposed to a panel, or multiple interviewers. The questions should open ended and the interviewer is encouraged to seek out short tangents when something of historical interest is mentioned. Interviewers should avoid verbal acknowledgments for the sake of the transcription.
This brief document presents the Oral History Association’s guidelines for how to conduct a high-quality oral history interview; it highlights some standard practices that should help produce historically valuable and ethically conducted interviews.