The Oral History Manual is designed to help anyone interested in doing oral history research to think like an oral historian. Recognizing that oral history is a research methodology, the authors first define oral history and provide an overview of its various applications. They then examine in detail the processes of planning and doing oral history, which include articulating the purpose of interviews, determining legal and ethical parameters, identifying narrators and interviewers, choosing equipment, developing budgets and record-keeping systems, preparing for and recording interviews, and caring for interview materials. The Oral History Manual provides a road map for all oral history practitioners, from students to public historians.

Author Biography

Barbara W. Sommer has worked in oral history and public history for nearly 30 years. She is the author of Hard Work and a Good Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota, and is a co-author of The American Indian Oral History Manual: Making Many Voices Heard. She has taught oral history extensively in college classrooms in Nebraska and Minnesota and in community workshops around the United States and in Canada and is a founder of the Oral History Association of Minnesota. Mary Kay Quinlan is associate professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and editor of the Oral History Association Newsletter. She is a co-author of The American Indian Oral History Manual and of The People Who Made It Work: A Centennial Oral History of the Cushman Motor Works. She has taught oral history at the college level and in community workshops and, with Sommer, has presented at oral history conferences in the United States and Canada. They are co-founders of the Nebraska Foundation for the Preservation of Oral History.