According to Donald Ritchie in Doing Oral History, "[m]emory is the core of oral history, from which meaning can be extracted and preserved. Simply put, oral history collects memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews. An oral history interview generally consists of a well-prepared interviewer questioning an interviewee and recording their exchange in audio or video format. Recordings of the interview are transcribed, summarized, or indexed and then placed in a library or archives."
Donald Ritchie presents us a very academic framing of oral history that places value on events or people of 'historical significance'. But what can be considered historically significant? And who determines that? Traditionally, archives and history with a capital H have documented particular privileged communities, leaving out the stories of those that have been exploited, moved via diaspora, erradicated, etc. People from these communities cannot track their family history through the traditional archive nor geneology work. Many of us only have family stories that have been passed on from generation to generation.
Oral histories are key to community memory and identity formation. Oral histories are exciting and powerful forms of memory keeping.
However, as with all things, time can slowly errode those memories and stories can change in the game of telephone as they are passed from person to person. On this page, you will find resources and tools available to help you capture family and community oral histories.
Doing Oral History by 
Community Oral History Toolkit by 
Story Bridges by 
The American Indian Oral History Manual by Current SDSU students, staff and faculty have access to Adobe Creative Cloud to utilize Audition CS6 and Premiere Pro as well as Zoom which can be used for audio recording and editing.
Free audio editing software that is not available through SDSU:
