Finding like-minded organizations is the first step in creating meaningful partnerships, which is at the heart of the Center’s mission to document Louisiana's diverse cultural history. We rely on your expertise about your subject, and in return, we provide leadership, expertise, and educational tools for oral history best practices.

When partnering with the Williams Center, there are a variety of potential relationships to explore. The center offers the following services, which vary on a case-by-case basis depending on the needs of the project and available resources: training, consultations, equipment loans, and collaboration on resource-seeking and presentation. Partners are responsible for providing interviews that meet the center's collection development criteria. Additionally, if they are able to provide transcription or indexing of interviews, this will speed up the center’s ability to process and provide public access to those interviews.

To that end, Williams Center staff will advise on best practices and will loan digital field recorders that record audio in preservation-quality format (.wav). The center will preserve the master files and create compressed user copies for access. We are also able to partner with additional repositories to ensure that several copies of the interview collections exist via multiple access points.

If you would like to do your own oral history project but are not sure where to start, take our advice. Start small and manageable and go from there. Think about what you want as a final product and what resources are available to you and arrange your timeline, your goals, and your action items around that. We are happy to provide project planning advice via a consultation and/or training. If you would like to take it to another level and think partnering with the Williams Center could work for you, please view the next tile, "Collaborate with the Williams Center", or view our resources below.