ABSTRACT
Basically, in oral history for public policy, it is fine to summarize and paraphrase a lot. The purpose of the project was to do interviews that gathered relevant information and perspectives: the transcripts are the research data. It can be appropriate to summarize that data in own words or in the language most familiar to the audience of policy-makers. It is usually best to delay any publishing until after the policy decisions have been announced. Hopefully it is clear now that oral history for public policy is an addition to traditional oral history—a further derivation, by-product or application that is different from the primary product, without taking anything away from the value of that primary source. There are apps that transcribe speech into text fairly accurately without typing at all, but currently they can only transcribe a single speaker whose voice they have been 'trained' to recognize—not interviews with more than one voice.
