Case Study: Oral History and NPS Archives

A Conversation about NPS Archival Preservation and Access

This video captures a conversation between NPS archivists Anne Foster (Yellowstone National Park) and Brenna Lissoway (Chaco Culture National Historical Park) as they discuss issues related to oral history preservation and access. Topics include, in the order in which they are discussed:

• The importance of oral history release forms

• Dealing with legacy archival issues such as interviews without release forms

• Requests for restricting access to interviews and ways to manage those requests

• Oral history record-keeping and finding aides

• The importance of "Copyright and Privacy Waiver" signed by archives users

• The ethics of archival management and equitable access to research materials

• Issues associated with ethnographic interviews with Native American narrators in the Yellowstone collection

• The importance of creating a preservation plan at the start of oral history projects

• Accessioning oral history interviews contributed by interviewers outside the NPS

• The importance of documenting the context of oral history collections

• Dealing with “orphan” interviews without release forms

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Oral History Topics and NPS Archives

This video captures a brief conversation between NPS archivists Anne Foster (Yellowstone National Park) and Brenna Lissoway (Chaco Culture National Historical Park) as they discuss several issues related to oral history preservation and access in NPS archives. 
 

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