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

• “In the oral history interview, the process of remembering does not exist in a vacuum; it develops in the course of the dialogue between the interviewer and narrator in the context of their relationship.” ⁱ
• “In memory, time becomes “place”: all the recollected past exists simultaneously in the space of the mind.” ⁱⁱ
• “Events are identified and located in time in terms of a linear syntagmatic axis (chronology), two vertical paradigms (temporal simultaneity, formal similarity), and their combination in history discourse.” ⁱⁱⁱ
• “Memory is living history, the remembered past that exists in the present.” ^iv
• “… [the] definition of event as a cultural construction based on the context created by memory through selection and connection among a multiplicity of happenings and by the form in which the story is told.” ^v

ⁱ Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), Marjorie Shostak, “What the Wind Won’t Take Away” in Personal Narratives Group, Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narrative (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1989); Valerie Yow, ‘Ethics and Interpersonal Relationships in Oral History Resesarch,” OHReview, 22:1 (1995): 51-66.
ⁱⁱ Portelli, Alessandro (The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 32.
ⁱⁱⁱ Portelli, Alessandro (The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 99.
^iv Frisch, Michael, “Introduction,” In A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany, NY: Statue University of New York Press, 1990), xxiii.
^v Portelli, Alessandro (The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 99.