Diverse Personnel in Libraries

Diversity

Identity

Interviewees

Interviewing

Life History

Memory

Mentoring

Oral Historians: Tasks and Roles

Oral History

Oral History: Definitions

Shared Authority

Spectrum Initiative

Storytelling

Trauma

Validity

• It is possible that questions guide the interviewee into thinking about an experience in a different way.” ⁱ
• “The minute you ask a question you have a bias.” ⁱⁱ
• “… the process of oral history interviewing, because it involves the structuring of memory and because meaningfulness influences the construction processes of memory, is actually a process in the construction of a usable past.” ⁱⁱⁱ
• "A cardinal rule is to come to the interview thoroughly informed and then to let the subject do the talking." ^iv
• “`… you begin by asking questions, and the responses you get are often not answers to the specific questions you ask, but tell you something entirely different.” <sup>v</sup>
• “Within the conversation itself they negotiate the reality that is the life story of the speaker and the understanding of the listener.” <sup>vi</sup>
• “`I would suggestion that historians, or people who are engaged in interviewing, somehow transform the person who is being interviewed.’” ^vii
• “And by listening, keeping our agenda flexible to include not only what we think but also what the other person recognizes as important,we always find more than we’re looking for.” ^viii
• “…oral history material is produced in an interview situation, one in which the subject is triangulated between the interviewer and the experience being discussed. No matter how controlled the schedule of questions, the information is produced in a dialogue between individuals, each with a social position and identity, engaging in a conversation that exists at a necessary remove, in time or social space, from the experience being discussed.”

ⁱ Sitzia, Lorraine, “A Shared Authority: An Impossible Goal?” The Oral History Review 30 (1) (Winter/Spring 2003), 95.
ⁱⁱ (Saul Beneson, interviewed by Studs Terkel), “It’s Not the Song, It’s the Singing: Panel Discussion on Oral History,” In Grele, Ronald J., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History 2nd ed (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), 85.
ⁱⁱⁱ Grele, Ronald J., “Listen to Their Voices: Two Case Studies in the Interpretation of Oral History Interviews,” In Grele, Ronald J., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History 2nd ed. (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), 236.
^iv Harris, Alice Kessler, “Introduction,” In Grele, Ronald J., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History 2nd ed. (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), 5.
^v (Alice Kessler Harris, interviewed by Studs Terkel) “It’s Not the Song, It’s the Singing: Panel Discussion on Oral History,” In Grele, Ronald J., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History 2nd ed (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), 56.
^vi Mann, Chris, “Family Fables,” In Chamberlain, Mary and Paul Thompson, eds., Narrative and Genre (London; New York: Routledge, 1998), 95.
^vii (Saul Beneson, interviewed by Studs Terkel), “It’s Not the Song, It’s the Singing: Panel Discussion on Oral History,” In Grele, Ronald J., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History 2nd ed (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), 76.
^viii Portelli, Alessandro (The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 62.
^ix Frische, Michael, A Shared Authority; Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 21.