An oral history collectioninterviews summarised, indexed and released with consent

Method

1. 1

   Set up the collection

   Decide the shelf’s name and give it the archive reference as its line: “Quarry and mill voices, oral history collection OH-2025, Ellery Falls Historical Society.” In the shelf notes, write down the project’s standards: how segments are timed, how names are spelled, what the release form allows.

   Connect your assistant to know.sh once, following the support page, and ask it to make that shelf. Each interview will be one document, titled with its number, the narrator and the subject: Interview 7 — Marjorie Tate: the quarry and the 1971 closing. Its overview is the catalogue record: narrator, date and place, interviewer, length, the recording’s archive number, and one line on its release status.

2. 2

   Listen, and give your assistant the notes

   Listen with the recording open in the archive’s player and type notes as you go. Every time the conversation turns, write the time code, the subject, the people and places, and a line or two on what the narrator says. Eight to fifteen segments for an hour’s interview is usual. For a restricted segment, write only its time codes and the word restricted.

   Give those notes and the catalogue record to your assistant and ask it to make the interview’s document: the record as the overview, and one Observation finding per segment, titled with its time code and subject — “00:14:20 — The quarry whistle and Quarry Road” — with a third-person summary drawn only from your notes. The recording itself does not go to the assistant.

3. 3

   Check the segments and transcribe the excerpts yourself

   Open the document in Edit with the recording beside you. Check every time code and every summary: the assistant never heard the interview, so anything it smoothed over or guessed is yours to correct. Then add the passages that deserve the narrator’s own words: three to six short excerpts, transcribed word for word by you, each a finding filed as Evidence, titled with its time code and subject.

   Keep them short. The recording is the source; the excerpt is a pointer to it, and a researcher who wants more comes to the archive.

4. 4

   Record the release and any restrictions

   Give every interview a Decision finding titled “Release and restrictions”. Record the date the release was signed, what it permits, where the signed form is kept, and any restriction the narrator asked for: “00:41:10–00:47:30 closed until 2040 at the narrator’s request.”

   A restricted segment is a finding of its own, holding its time code, a note that it is closed, and the restriction; no summary of what it says. That way it can be left off a public link without cutting anything else, and nobody reading the catalogue learns what the narrator chose to hold back.

5. 5

   Let the index become the finding aid

   Open the shelf’s Index to this shelf. The people and places named in segment titles should appear with the interviews and segments where they come up: Tate, Hollis, Ellery, Congregational. A name that appears only deep in a summary may not reach the index, so if a researcher would look for it, put it in the segment’s title.

   Agree one spelling for each name and place, and write it in the shelf notes. When narrators disagree — the Hollis mill or Hollis’s mill — pick one form for titles and keep the other in the summary.

6. 6

   Ask your assistant to read across the interviews

   Ask your assistant to compare interviews on the shelf: which narrators mention the 1971 closing, and do they agree on the month? It can leave a proposed note, with Accept and Dismiss, wherever one interview’s date or spelling differs from another’s; accept the ones you will act on and dismiss the rest.

   Ask it, too, for follow-up questions before an interviewer goes back to a narrator. It works only from your summaries and excerpts, not the recordings, so check anything it suggests against what you heard.

7. 7

   Publish released interviews, one link each

   For each interview whose narrator has signed a release, press Share and make a link with no expiry. Leave out the Release and restrictions finding and every restricted segment from each finding’s page. Readers see the overview, the segments and the excerpts, without your notes or highlights.

   Copy the link when it appears; it is shown once. Make a Read me first document listing the released interviews and their links, share that, and put its link on the society’s website. Interviews without a signed release get no link.