Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez, Call Box 9000 Mayagüez, PR 00681 (787) 832-4040 ext. 3810, 2151, 2155 library@uprm.edu
Archiving your interviews and making them available to other researchers is an essential part of the oral history process. Plan for this early on. Identify repositories where you may want to submit your oral history interviews for archiving. Preferably, these should be archives that collect other oral history material. Obtain information about the policies and requirements these repositories have for accepting material for archiving. Contact repository administrators if you have questions.
Metadata makes your content more valuable to users by adding important context and rich descriptive information. When submitting your interviews for archiving, provide good metadata, such as detailed descriptions of what was discussed in the interview and keywords that convey the most important topics and aspects. Other metadata elements that should be provided include the name of the interviewer, the name of the narrator, and the date of the interview. All of this information facilitates identification of your interviews, enhances their findability, adds context, and helps interested researchers gain an accurate idea about what topics were covered.
Remember that you should take care to not harm narrators in the oral history interview process. Therefore, it can be a good idea to allow narrators to review interview recordings and transcripts before archiving. This gives narrators a chance to make corrections or edits or redact parts of an interview that they are not comfortable with sharing publicly.
Also keep in mind that even when narrators give their permission to deposit their interview in an archive, they may change their mind later. If this happens, be considerate of narrators wishes. Remember that they are co-creators of the interviews and should have a say in what is done with them and who has access to the content.
The following resources are from the Oral History Association.