A Low-Cost Method for Phone Interviews

My dissertation topic deals with the 1960s, so many of the people I am studying are still alive. I am gathering oral histories from these individuals to gain a behind-the-scenes perspective on the events I am researching. They also add an Indian voice or perspective that is not always found in the official documents I come across in the archives. If you are in a similar situation, you might be interested in a method I came up for conducting interviews by telephone at almost no cost.

I don't have a land line at home. I use Skype instead. It probably costs me $20 per year for my use of Skype. For this small annual fee, I can make unlimited long distance phone calls within the United States. My only other expense was for a small headpiece. This was maybe $5 at Radio Shack. A few days ago I found a program that will record my phone conversations over Skype. The great thing about this program was that it was absolutely free. It is called Call Graph. Once I installed the program, it automatically records every phone call I make over Skype. I can then add tags and titles to keep track of recorded phone calls, delete phone calls I don't want to keep, and play back any of the phone calls as a sound file. I hope this method works for you like it is working for me.