ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights ethical and legal considerations related to the oral history interview itself, and should not be construed as offering legal advice for oral history projects as a whole. An oral history interviewer will encounter ethical considerations at virtually every stage of preparing for the interview, conducting it, and following up afterwards. The ethical framework of oral history interviews is based on respect for the interviewee. Interviewers also have an ethical obligation to conduct thorough, objective research that will enable them to develop appropriate questions. Community oral history projects sometimes go off the rails, when once-enthusiastic volunteers wander away and fail to follow through on the post-interview tasks that take a project to completion. Interviewers themselves may not be involved in developing the Legal Release Agreement for the project. It will help them explain the forms and the concept of copyright assignment, however, if the forms are written in plain, straightforward language, not complicated, hard-to-understand legalese.
