Starting your own Chapter of the
Science Fiction Oral History Association

SFOHA encourages volunteers everywhere to formalize their activities into local area chapters. In order to start a chapter, you need to have enough people in your area to support a reasonable meeting size. We invite you to contact us at info@sfoha.org to find out how many members we already have in your area. When you establish a chapter we can help you to contact those members to let them know about meetings and other activities.

We also encourage you to join the SFOHA Talk list and announce chapter activities there.

All members of subchapters should be or become members of SFOHA. This is only $5 a year and has benfits, so we don't think your members will find this burdensome.

We suggest you form a chapter by organizing a meeting and electing a local chapter president and a local chapter secretary/treasurer. We are happy to host web pages for chapters here on the SFOHA web site.

Suggested Chapter Activities

• Review our Bylaws to familiarize yourselves with the goals and structure of the organization.
• Identify what recording equipment is available to you. The Board of Directors may be able to allocate funds for the purchase of recording equipment and materials. We also encourage you to raise funds for this purpose by collecting donations. If subjects in recordings release the right to sell those recordings, you can also sell copies of recordings if the funds are re-invested in SFOHA activities and equipment.
• Identify upcoming events where you would like to record, organize recording.
• Always contact the organization running the event prior to attending and recording.
• If possible, arrange to have the event's parent organization distribute our release form to program participants. In any case, make sure subjects on recordings sign releases.
• Hold Interviews and record them.
• Practice interviewing, arrange workshops on interviewing and oral history.
• Run Fan tables and parties at SF conventions, pass out fliers to promote SFOHA.
• Produce a chapter newsletter, or send articles to be included in the SFOHA Newsletter.
• Send the original recordings of all events to the master archive*, and a duplicate recording to the backup archive.
• If possible, digitize recordings and send copies to our deposit collections. Please coordinate that with the head Archivist on the Board of Directors.