Preservation and growth strategies for the Randolph County Archives of Oral History: Using the Oral History Evaluation Guidelines to improve a pre-existing program

Founded in 2006 in Pocahontas, Arkansas, the Randolph County of Oral History (RCAOH) sough to collect the stories of Randolph County's elderly residents in conjunction with the Pocahontas sesquicentennial celebration. After the formation of the Randolph County Heritage Museum (RCHM), the RCAOH was placed under its care. The success of programs and displays developed at the RCHM overshadowed the RCAOH. Forgotten, it was left virtually unattended.;Attempting to salvage the program, Clements used the Oral History Association's "Oral History and Evaluation Guidelines" to analyze the condition of the RCAOH. Identifying a number of areas for improvement, plans were developed to correct these shortcomings. A number of policies were created, forms were developed for the accessioning and deaccessioning of materials, policies and forms were developed to support preservation work, archival quality materials were purchased to protect the collection, finding aids were developed to allow for scholarly access, and a "Making Citizen-Historian" program was developed as a means of using volunteers to support the work of the RCAOH. After developing the program, Clements ran it from August of 2009 until the end of April 2010.;Once Clements' program ended in April 2010, the results were analyzed to determine the success of failures of the changes enacted. While the "Making Citizen-Historians" program failed to attract the volunteers needed, the use of some forms and policies did prove successful. Pondering the results of his analysis, Clement determined that the lack of coordinating leadership and the consistent shortage of funds would plague this collection indefinitely. To remedy these problems, he suggests the transfer of the collection to the Northeast Arkansas Regional Archives. Once complete, the old RCAOH program could be converted to the Randolph County Oral History Project (RCOHP). Freed from the burdens of preservation work, the RCOHP could focus its energies and limited funding on the collection of quality interviews in the Randolph County region. The final chapter discusses the benefits of this dissertation for the RCAOH, those seeking to create similar projects, and the archival community at large.