Oral History has also been advanced by a growing interest in the lives of ordinary people and by the popular work of talented interviewers and compilers. This group of professional oral historians were concerned with the need for professional oral history standards, an issue which had always loomed large but had been grappled with on an individual basis by practitioners. In 1979 they formulated evaluation guidelines useful for assessing oral history projects. These written descriptions and checklists of what constitutes good oral history have been influential in providing a common base for the profession. The Oklahoma City Federal Building after the April 1995 bombing.
Oral history invokes thoughts of the time period, place, and situation to which they refer.
It is fascination and curiosity intensified, and that is because it is the recounting of actual people and actual events, and we are hearing about that person's experiences in their own words. It is the next best thing to sitting around a campfire, or a dinner table, and being told the story ourselves. Nothing is quite as interesting or as powerful as, for instance, listening to your grandfather talk about the beaches of France in WWII, what the people were like, what the aura was like during that time, what he thought about, felt, went through. Oral history is another avenue for preserving this information and presenting as part of history in general. Oral history gives ordinary people who have had extraordinary experiences a way to share their story and have it documented permanently, where they probably would not have otherwise been heard.