Oral Histories Continued

          Still catching up on oral histories.  (It takes a long time to transcribe even a 30 minute tape.)  Anyway I had two more thoughts as I was finishing a project for one of the institutions where I consult.  As I mentioned I do a verbatim transcription of the oral histories, but I’m not perfect by any means.  I do go over the tape at least three times before I declare it complete and then make a hard copy, which I edit.  It’s funny how your eye can see what it thinks should be on the page rather than what is actually there.  Because of that tendency I’d recommend all transcriptions be edited by a second person before they are available to the public.  To properly edit, the second person must review the transcript while listening to the tape so that they don’t correct what is the speech pattern of the speakers by making grammatical corrections.

The second thought - One of the things that one should do after a transcription has been completed for an oral history is to provide an abstract.  This is simply a summation of the topics covered in the recording and should include any information known about the participants.  The summation should include a listing of subjects including individuals mentioned on the tape.  The reason for this, at least in my case, is to make it easier to later add the metadata. The catalogers have told me this is incredibly helpful and saves them a great deal of time having to listen to the tapes or even to read the transcripts.