She describes her worth as the ethical collection of information that is then preserved in an archival setting, not just for today and tomorrow, but for the future as well. Community involvement plays a big role in making this happen.

“That’s a cool thing about my job, getting to learn from others and making sure that information is stored in a responsible way in our archive and then presented, whether it is through programming or through our online interfaces so people can access the materials,” she said.

Williams sat down with The Herald Journal to talk about the top three things she wishes everybody knew about her work.

No. 1. Creating special collections by gathering oral history is a collaborative effort.

Randy Williams: Every year or two, I do a different oral history project that helps bring in information about a community or a work or a group of people … either we have the information (and) we were building upon work that had been done previously with the Grouse Creek Cultural Survey and with the Fife’s ... work with collecting the songs and the poems of working cowboys.

Sometimes, however, it might be a community that hasn’t made its way to an archive. Maybe the letters and journals and diaries of that community haven’t found its way to special collections and archives.

No. 2. Preserving those histories and sharing them with others are as important as writing down the stories.

RW: Not only do we have (the history), but we present it and make it available. Many of us in our own families might interview Grandma or Grandpa or an aunt or an uncle, but are we then depositing it somewhere that everyone in the family can get it, now or in the future? That is the beauty of an archive.

No. 3. Teaching others to do the same allows the work to continue.

RW: The third piece is training the next generation. And that is a very important part, whether I am training students as I did today to use our materials, or this summer as I am teaching students to actually do the work.

Oral history work doesn’t just stay where you think it would be, in history and folklore. It’s also in science, it’s also anyplace you need to learn what people have done in the past and appreciate and gather from a living resource — which is the farmer, the rancher, the refugee, the participant in drug court. If you need to know, you ask the person who’s lived it and then respect that by depositing it and making it available, and then you respect the tradition by training the next generation to do ethical field work.