You may be interested in the discussion and recommendations of the NWDA 
for encoding of Oral histories, to be found here:

http://www.orbiscascade.org/index/cms-filesystem-action?file=nwda/tools/nwdabpg2005oralhistappendix.pdf



Creighton Barrett wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Can anyone provide examples of EAD-based finding aids and/or catalogs 
> that offer highly detailed item-level descriptions?  Audiovisual 
> collections would be especially useful.  Is anyone using EAD to, for 
> example, describe (rather than simply list) the tracks on an individual 
> audio reel?  How about including multiple accession numbers related to a 
> track? 
> 
> I'm working with a collection of folk songs that really needs to be 
> described at the 'track level.'  Each recording has been duplicated 
> several times and has a great deal of accompanying documentation (i.e. 
> lots of contextual information).  There are also duplicates at several 
> different institutions.  This means that each individual recording 
> (originally on acetate discs) is now in possession of a unique set of 
> accession numbers and describing the collection even at the item-level 
> (the reels and cassettes) is ineffective.  I know this could be done 
> with a database of some sort, but the collection also needs a finding 
> aid.  Would it be best to just build a database and then construct an 
> XML finding aid using data from the database?  Has anyone done this sort 
> of thing?  At what point is there too much information in a finding aid? 
> 
> I know I've asked a lot, but I'd appreciate any feedback. 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Creighton Barrett
> MLIS Candidate (2009)
> School of Information Management
> Dalhousie University
>