ABSTRACT
Interviews are the central stage in the oral history life cycle. This chapter presents the steps that are intended to guide practitioners in historical organizations through the interviewing process. For historical organizations, grounded as they are in providing history services for public audiences, background research helps determine interview content and how oral history furthers their public history and local history missions. Two kinds of research are helpful: research on the interview topics and narrator-specific research. Historical organization repositories are good sources of information for both project research and narrator-specific research. To help organizations deal with the impact of technological change, the Commission has a Digital Preservation Assistance grants program. Signing the legal release agreement and taking a photograph of the narrator in the interview setting, are done before the interviewer and narrator leave the interview. An oral history interview is an opportunity to record a memory and create a primary source document.
