Skip to Main Content

With Voices True: Oral History Toolkit

Release Forms

Signed release forms from the interviewee and interviewer are necessary to ensure that the University Archives can provide public access to the interviews once the interviews become part of the WVT collection. Please make sure that the interviewee reads the release form before the interview begins, and signs the form after the interview is completed. By signing the release form, the interviewee gives the University of Notre Dame permission to preserve the interviews for use by researchers and the general public.

It is important that interview participants give informed consent. Additionally, it is important that participants are given complete information about how the interview will be used as well as how the interview will be preserved, maintained, and deposited in an archive.

The University Archives will not be able to accept any interviews without signed release forms.

Transcriptions

Transcriptions allow for increased discoverability and accessibility. Help with transcriptions is available from the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship on the 2nd floor of Hesburgh Library.

The software, ExpressScribe, allows you to slow, speed up, and play back recordings to assist with transcription. A speech-to-text function is currently unavailable.

On average, it takes four hours to transcribe one hour of content. 

For more information about transcription, please see the link below. 

Format

The preferred preservation format for all text documents is PDF/A, which is a version of PDF standardized for archiving. 

 

To create a PDF/A, please refer to this helpful guide from the University of Northern British Columbia.

Note: for most methods of saving a document in PDF/A, Adobe Acrobat must be installed on your computer. This can be downloaded using the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite available on most computers found within the library.

Use the following naming conventions for your PDFs:

Release Forms
CRC_InterviewerLastName_YYYYMMDD_RF.pdf
CRC_IntervieweeLastName_YYYYMMDD_RF.pdf
Transcription
CRC_InterviewerLastName_YYYYMMDD_T.pdf