6. Approaches to individual studies

In many oral history projects informants will be selected for recording because they are representative of a particular group of people or a particular field of experience. Additionally, individuals may be chosen for interviewing as key informants because their unique or special experiences are of outstanding historical importance and essential for documenting a particular field of research satisfactorily (often such interviews are equally important for biographical purposes). These informants, leading politicians or trade unionists for example, sometimes warrant intensive interviewing. They also require special care so that the scale of recording is kept in proportion to the kind of contribution they have to make.

There are a number of possible approaches - not always mutually exclusive - to individual studies and the kind that is most appropriate should always be individually assessed. For example:

A full scale autobiographical interview or series of interviews with a prominent figure may be justified in cases where the person's life and work are largely undocumented.

In cases where the key person is dead, a series of biographical interviews with the third parties who knew him well may be worth carrying out towards the same ends as in the previous example.

There may be special events or episodes with which the individual is particularly associated (or which are relevant to the project at hand) and about which there is little available documentation. In such a case the individual study might be focused only on the areas or periods of special significance.

In an otherwise well documented life there can be minor gaps which it would be valuable to fill and recording might therefore best be devoted to, as it were, oral footnoting.

Finally, individual studies may be validly carried out to produce a 'voice-portrait' of the person concerned. In this case neither the aim nor the expectation: of the interview would be to produce original information. The object would be to create, through the medium of recorded sound, a distinctive kind of document illustrating and reflecting the individual's personality or style more than his record.

In choosing the appropriate approach for the particular person, the scale of the interview should be related to the objectives of the project and geared to the existing records concerning the particular informant. Thus, it may not be desirable to hold back the progress of a major project by many labour intensive and time consuming individual studies, while it would certainly not be sensible to interview a leader in depth if the recordings are only likely to add occasional new glimpses to a generally well documented career.

The extent to which individual studies should feature in any archive's recording programme or, indeed, whether such studies should be the archive's main or sole pursuit is a matter which the particular collecting centre must decide in the light of its own policy and priorities. However, for systematic planning and in order to build up a balanced collection there are good practical and historical reasons for archives to structure their work on a subject or topic basis. In general, detailed individual studies tend to be very much more labour intensive and time consuming than topical projects. In the latter case a great many informants can usually be interviewed on the basis of one main piece of preparatory research, while in the former only one interview (or several interviews with one person) will often be recorded for similar effort. The historical justification for a subject approach is that many - possibly most - research fields include several levels or perspectives all of which need to be represented if the subject is to be satisfactorily documented. A labour history project, for example, might naturally lead to intensive interviews with important trade union leaders and in this way individual studies can be appropriately and economically developed from within topical projects.