Training links

The East Midlands Oral History Archive provides training in oral history to people in the East Midlands and the world via a variety of web resources. You may also find the following websites useful:

Oral history

• American Folklife Centre: A layman's introduction to field techniques for collecting folklife. Lots of good advice.
• Baylor University Institute for Oral History: Offers a series of invaluable on-line guides on the theory and practice of oral history. Includes a workshop for teachers, notes on using video.
• National Lottery Heritage Fund Guidance: Oral History Guidance is an invaluable aid for anyone planning oral history projects, even you are not applying for lottery funding.
• Indiana University Center for the Study of History and Memory: Oral History Techniques: How to Organize and Conduct Oral History Interviews.
• The Making of Oral History is a guide to the history of oral history by Graham Smith.
• Making Sense of Oral History: History Matters' guide to oral history, by Linda Shopes. Useful material on interpreting oral history.
• Minnesota Historical Society: Useful, well written, downloadable guides.
• Nebraska State Historical Society: Capturing the Living Past: An Oral History Primer.
• Oral History is a downloadable book by Graham Smith which is about using oral history in higher education.
• Oral History Association. Many resources. Includes links to other projects and oral history networks, a guide to digital technology, and guidelines for using oral history in the classroom.
• Oral History in the Digital Age has advice about almost every aspect of oral history and features many excellent videos.
• Oral History Society: Useful information about how to do oral history, copyright and ethics, archiving and most other issues related to oral history.
• Oral History - a Toolkit for Teachers: a pdf from what was English Heritage.
• The Southern Oral History Program has a downloadable oral history guide and examples of copyright forms.
• Step-by-Step Guide to Oral History by Judith Moyer. A useful guide which is thorough and easy to follow.
• The Texas Historical Commission has published a 16 page booklet called 'Fundamentals of Oral History' which you can print from the website.
• The University of Texas's US Latino & Latina WWII Project has training video clips which illustrate each stage of an oral history project.
• US Army Guide to Oral History: book by Stephen J Lofgren.

Audio equipment

• The Vermont Folk Life Centre Audio Field Recording Equipment Guide: An excellent guide to current recording technology.
• JISC's guides to all things digital contain a wealth of useful information.

YouTube

A quick and easy way to find oral history on the internet is to go to YouTube and search for 'oral history'. As well as excerpts from oral history interviews there are several examples of people talking about oral history generally.

• EMOHA's oral history tips video.
• A series of 'how to do oral history' videos from Minnesota Historical Society.
• The video channel for the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries featuring the director, Doug Boyd, contains a useful video about setting recording levels and reviews of several digital recorders. Some of these can also be found on the Oral History Society website (above).

Recording advice

General advice about recording sound and vision for radio, television or film can be found at these websites:

• Media College (video and audio resources and advice)
• Digital Stories @ UMBC (resources for digital storytelling)

Digital tools

• The Oral Historian's Digital Toolbox is a list of existing and emergent digital tools which are of use to oral historians.
• The Digital Omnium is Doug Boyd's blog on oral history and all things digital.

Examples of websites which synchronise audio/video to transcript

• OHMS is the oral history metadata synchroniser developed by the the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky. You can learn more at Oral History Online. Some of the Center's online oral histories use this technology and can be listened to, and read.
• The Texas Legacy Project logs its interviews by themes and links these to segments of the video/audio, as well as linking the transcript to the audio/video.
• The HistoryMakers Digital Archive uses Digital Video Library (DVL) technology created and pioneered by Carnegie Mellon University. 

Archiving

• The Activist's Guide to Archiving Video
• The Library of Congress digital preservation website
• The Library of Congress 'Cataloguing and Digitizing Toolbox'
• National Film & Sound Archive in Australia 'Care for Audio Visual Materials'
• Information about CDs and DVDs can be found at the Canadian Conservation Institute