Transcribe Oral Histories

You can hear some of the interviews and see their transcriptions at our oral history website in the Idealist posting for this opportunity.

When you are assigned one of the oral interviews yet to be transcribed at the above URL, what you need is a computer with internet access able to play a music file (MP3) with speakers either built in or external, and a way to type up the interview in Microsoft word, like a keyboard.

You may find that there are words you don’t know the spelling of, or you may not catch a name or a phrase correctly. Maybe we are talking about some geological term, or the name of a location... whatever it is, Not to Worry. If you are unsure, please put a question mark in brackets next to what you are uncertain about [?]. There may be many of these.

One of our volunteers will then listen to the interview while reading your transcription looking for [?], and will make editorial corrections. Finally, the interview will go on file at Grand Canyon National Park’s Museum Collection and on the oral history web site.

To review a finished document transcript so you can see the format we are looking for, please go to our Oral History web page and click on any of the pdf transcripts.

You will need to save your finished transcript as a Word document and e-mail it to me when you are done.

We anticipate you should be able to transcribe one interview in 4 weeks or less. I may touch base with you after a month to see how you are doing and if you are still interested in proceeding with your assignment.

As you transcribe, please don’t include Um’s and Uh-huh’s, coughs, and such in your finished transcript.

Do you have additional questions? Again, Not to Worry! E-mail me and we will see what we need to do to make this work. I am a volunteer, just like you, and we are all in this together.

If you would like to begin, contact me through the Idealist portal letting me know you would like to be assigned an interview to transcribe. I will then assign you an interview/transcript based on our needs.

If you are a student looking for credit, please note: We are often contacted by students who would like us to document their volunteer hours. We do not enter into service contracts but will recognize in writing up to 12 volunteer hours for each usable transcript the student transcribes. In this case, usable means the transcript follows the format we use and is accurate. Just like at school, if you send us poor quality work, you will get no credit hours acknowledged. There is no time limit to complete an assignment and we have no limit as to which grade you are in.