Table of Contents

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About the Author

Donald A. Ritchie is Associate Historian in the United States Senate Historical Office, where he conducts an oral history program. A former president of the Oral History Association, he has served on the council of the American Historical Association, and chaired the Organization of American Historians' committee on research and access to historical documentation. He has conducted many oral history workshops, and for ten years, he edited the Twayne
oral history series.

Reviews

"A comprehensive handbook on the theory, methods, and practice of oral history, based on work by the Oral History Association to revise its professional standards and principles." --Book News, Inc. (on a previous edition)
"Donald Ritchie...has produced an invaluable manual that will serve research scholars and teachers equally well. ... Without pretension, Doing Oral History fulfills the promise touted on the jacket cover: to provide 'practical advice and reasonable explanations for anyone.' ... [A] significant contribution to making oral history accessible to a wide audience of potential users." --The History Teacher
"Written in a friendly question-and-answer format, this book gives advice for preparing, setting up, and conducting an interview. ... Ritchie's step-by-step guide will help you preserve your family's experiences for generations to come." --Family Tree
"Ritchie has laid out the fundamentals to guide novices and given long-term practitioners material that will help them re-evaluate their own approaches. This book needs to be on every oral historian's shelf." --Northwest Oral History Association
"This book is not a dustcatcher. It is destined to be dog-eared and full of underlined passages, from the first time you pick it up. In a user-friendly question-and-answer format, much like an oral history interview, Don Ritchie has packed into one modest volume enough practical advice to get an oral history project off the ground, help a novice oral historian conduct a responsible interview, and challenge more experienced oral historians, librarians, and
archivists who might use oral history to think broadly about the impact of what they are doing." --Mid-Atlantic Archivist
"[The] standard work for many years to come." --Public Historian
"Simple, straightforward, and effective. ... [A] stimulating and formidable work...it is indeed a guide to practice, but it is much more: it is a stepping-off point to the increasingly large universe that oral history pracititioners occupy." --Oral History Review
"[An] all-purpose guide to the entire range of the oral history process...this volume provides extensive background on oral history and its relation to the larger realm of historical inquiry, discusses how oral history interviewing compares with journalistic and other interviewing techniques, and considers the workings of the human memory." --American Archivist
"A definitive guide that provides all the practical advice and explanations needed to turn your ideas and goals into action and to create recordings that illuminate the human experience for generations to come. Definitely recommended." --The Ultimate Puzzle: Family Research
"[A] comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the art of oral history." --Oral History in New Zealand