How To Document Your Recordings
Because oral history is, in part, an archival practice, it is critical that recordings be documented. I strongly recommend that researchers build procedures for themselves that will allow them to keep intellectual control over the records they produce. Below is an outline of what I ask my students to create for each recording.
Informed Consent Forms
Each recording packet must contain a signed informed consent form.
Deed of Gift
If the interviewee has agreed to donate the recordings, please include a deed of gift.
Field Notes
Field notes should be completed for each of your interviews and submitted as part of a completed interview packet.
Field Notes should contain the following items:
Date notes are compiled
Interviewee Name
Interviewer
Interview Date
Location
Interviewee Biography (1 paragraph)
Interviewer Biography (1 para about yourself)
Description of the interview circumstances
Add anything that will help you (and any other user of the interview) later make sense of what you have recorded. Like a diary, this journal will contain a record of experiences, ideas, fears, mistakes, confusions, breakthroughs, and problems that arise during fieldwork. A journal represents the personal side of fieldwork; it includes reactions to informants and the feelings you sense from others. Rereading these notes at a later time will show how quickly you forget what occurred during the first days and weeks of fieldwork. Months later, when you begin to write up the study, the journal becomes an important source of data. Doing fieldwork differs from many other kinds of research in that the field worker becomes a major research instrument. Making an introspective record of fieldwork enables a person to take into account personal biases and feelings, and to understand their influence on the research.
(Adapted/stolen from James P. Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview (Wadsworth Group/Thomson Learning; Belmont California, 1979), p. 76.)
Interview content (What did you talk about, in narrative form?)
Recordings
File Name/File Label
Each recording must be properly labeled. I can’t stress this enough.
The recording itself MUST have on it a label with:
- Your name
- The interviewee’s name
- The date on which the interview was conducted
- The project name
- The interview number. By this, I mean that if this is the first interview you do for this project, this is interview 1. If it is the second interview, it is interview 2.
- You should also indicate if the interview broken up in to more than one file – as in file 1 of 4, file 2 of 4, etc.
These items are absolutely essential, as they help you keep track of your interviews and recordings.
A proper file name might look like this:
| Napoli-Jones 010506 immigration project interview #1, file 1 of 3 |
Backups
ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS MAKE COPIES OF YOUR RECORDINGS. Never let an original recording out of your possession. Never keep all your recordings in one place. Never edit your original recording.
Have a separate flash drive for backup, or upload them to your Google drive, or SOMETHING. Hard drives are a temporary storage medium. They die.
Interview Log
An interview log is a record of whom you interviewed, their contact information, when the interview took place and other relevant administrative information. An interview log might look like this:
| Interviewee name | Interview number | Date | Contact information | Informed consent statement signed? | Deed of gift signed? | Transcript prepared | Recordings duplicated |
| Tom Jones | 1 | 01/01/06 | Xxx someplace way, xxx@nyu.edu | yes | no | No | Yes, to cassette backup and to CD |
