Gail Matthews-DeNatale, Ph.D.
Graduate School of Library and Information Science Simmons College
This toolkit is designed to prepare you for a successful interview experience. In addition to overview materials and recommended readings, this resource includes modules to guide you through three phases: interview preparation, the interview itself, and post-interview work to prepare materials for archiving.
Good interviews are deceptively complex. Experienced interviewers will tell you that their seemingly effortless recorded "conversations" required careful planning and considerable advance preparation. The modules in this toolkit will guide you through the interview process so that you, too, can experience success.
About Oral History
The term "oral history" evokes images of intrepid volunteers, seeking out community leaders so that stories and memories can be recorded for posterity. Interviews are central to the process of oral history, but it's important to think of oral history as a much larger process of community engagement that extends into many areas: ethics, responsible stewardship of interview materials, and "giving back" by sharing interviews with a larger audience. Audio quality, and video as appropriate, is key to success in oral history -- and for this reason the process of fieldwork may also challenge you to become adept with technologies with which you are unfamiliar. The diagram below provides an overview of the process and dimensions of oral history.
About the Voices Project
Voices of SLA is an international repository of interviews with SLA's elected and volunteer leaders, Fellows , honorees, mid-career professionals, people of significant influence to the profession, SLA staff members and others. Their stories and opinions will have relevance to students, graduate school faculty, information professionals within and outside SLA, researchers, and will serve as inspiration for future generations of information professionals, and for purposes of marketing the Association as SLA and the profession evolve.
Voices of SLA began as a project of the Fellows of SLA. A committee of 16 volunteers discussed the concept and formed guidelines in 2008. When the Centennial Commission was launched to create celebrations in honor of SLA 's 100th anniversary, the Voices of SLA project was folded into that effort and that budget for the year. It was always intended for the Voices of SLA project to be an ongoing effort beyond 2009.
In addition to discussions with interested volunteers, the Voices of SLA Project Director and Project Manager contacted people involved in the Medical Library Association's 30 year old oral history project. Valuable information and guidelines are found on the MLA web site. The Oral History Association website was consulted, along with other resources. Several videos and guidelines from the Library of Congress Veterans' History Project were reviewed.
During the first year of the Project, ten interviews were completed, edited, and transcripts posted on the SLA web site. A list of core questions that cross all interviews was created, along with suggested "tracks" depending on who is being interviewed. A synopsis of personal recollections of past presidents of SLA was compiled. Some interviews done for the San Andreas Chapter in the 1990s were cleared for inclusion on the web site. One of those interviews was updated in January 2009. Eventually all of them will be updated. An web-based oral history toolkit created by an oral history specialist serves as an ongoing guide to Chapters and Divisions that wish to conduct interviews of their members.
Technology will increase in sophistication in time, with the use of podcasts, video, and other means of enhancing the value and interest of the interviews. Also a timed index will help users cut across several interviews to pull out responses to similar questions.
After interviews are conducted, the unedited tapes as well as legal release forms signed by the interviewer and interviewee, are stored at SLA Headquarters (see instructions elsewhere in this manual). Chapters and Divisions that conduct interviews should deposit their unedited interviews and release forms at SLA Headquarters as well as in their own archives.
Success of the Voices of SLA project will be measured by the number of people accessing the files, the reasons for their use of the files, their opinions about the quality of the interviews, and their suggestions of questions and subjects for future interviews.
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