This week Price and I are interviewing at least one of our important sources. We were trying to arrange for two interviews this week, but we have been unable to get consistent responses from one of them. We hope to catch them before they leave the country in March. I have learned that with short-term projects like this you must anticipate what you want to do early on or you risk not meeting deadlines with important parts of your research.

I have spent a significant amount of time trying to plan interview questions, but most of them are dependent on where our research takes us. It is impossible to predict what information you may need, so developing a diverse question set is a necessity. The guide posted on our course site provides insight on how “to provoke rich, complex answers.”  During our first interview with our school’s local librarian, we were wholly unprepared with questions and setting up a proper interview to put on our website. The interviewee did not know ahead of time that we wanted something more robust and that is our fault for not following proper pre-interview protocols. We decided that our initial meeting was more to put us in the right direction of how we wanted to pursue our case.

On February 28, 2018, we are interviewing Amy Ford, the Branch Manager at the St. Mary’s County Library in Lexington Park, MD. My initial e-mail to Amy included enough detail that this interview should go a lot smoother. She is anticipating cameras and has given permission for us to use the recordings on our website. While she may not know a lot about or specific case, we hope that she can shed some light on the implications of book censorship and how it has been handled in St. Mary’s County. We hope to hear her opinion on the matter and perhaps get some historical context on why Song of Solomon was banned when it was. I am excited to put together a more finished product after collecting the information from our first interview. I intend to have a written record if website visitors would prefer to read the information instead of watching our video.

If possible, I hope to also complete our interview with Professor Robin Bates because he was part of the opposition to the banning of Song of Solomon. If we miss him, I may elect for an e-mail interview just to establish the content on our website. The St. Mary’s College Department of Educational Studies is full of professors who work with the local schools and I would like to set up an interview with another professor. For each interview Price and I conduct, we will need to develop our list of questions and adjust them depending on the professor’s area of expertise or connection to book censorship.

The most difficult part of interviewing will be masking our bias and making sure we are not leading our subjects to the conclusions we expect to draw. Many of our subjects are academics, which leads us to expect anti-book censorship views, but it is important to keep an open mind.

 

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