Marc Pachter founded  Living Self-Portraits at the Smithsonian and was its master interviewer.  In his TED talk below he shares the challenges of getting a good interview.

…if all you’re going to get from the interviewee is their public self, there’s no point in it. It’s pre-programmed. It’s infomercial, and we all have infomercials about our lives. We know the great lines, we know the great moments, we know what we’re not going to share, …

Marc recounts several interviews and how he cut below the surface conversation to have his subjects reveal the truth of their lives…Read more.

How many of you could use some further training to enhance your personal history skills? I know I can!

Whether you’re starting out or well established,  here’s a select list of sites that can help.  I’ve combed the Internet to bring you some of the best…Read more.

Imagine yourself in this situation. You’ve just completed videotaping an hour-long interview. It was  nicely lit and framed. And the interview itself was fantastic! Excitedly you rush back to your editing suite,  put up your interview to screen, and then the shock. The picture looks great but the audio is terrible.There’s nothing you can do to fix it. The interview is ruined!

I know that getting flawless sound all the time is nearly impossible. But you can improve the odds if you avoid making these 5 common audio mistakes…Read more.

Over the past year Monday’s Link Roundup has brought you 336 links to articles of particular interest to personal historians, genealogists, storytellers, and memoir writers.  In case you missed some of these articles,  here are 7 of the best.

• The art of bookplates – in pictures. “A bookplate, or ex libris, is a small print for pasting inside the cover of a book, to express ownership. By the late 19th century, bookplates had developed into a highly imaginative form of miniature art. The British Museum’s new book showcases some of the many plates in their extensive collection. Browse through some of the best here.”

• The power of place: Robert Caro. “Show, don’t tell” is a mantra of narrative writers everywhere, but even the most useful adage can lose meaning with repetition. Before a lunchtime audience of writers at the Second Annual Compleat Biographer Conference on Saturday, legendary biographer Robert Caro reinvigorated the concept.”

• 7 Things You Can Do Today to Improve Your Book Design. “We all want to make our books better, more readable, more attractive to both buyers and reviewers. Here are 7 things you can do today to improve the design of your book and create a great-looking product.”

• Belongings. “There are three million immigrants in New York City. When they left home, knowing it could be forever, they packed what they could not bear to leave behind: necessities, luxuries, memories. Here is a look at what some of them brought.” [Thanks to Lettice Stuart of Portrait in Words for alerting me to this item.]

• Dear Photograph: A website with a window into the past. “In the past month, a summery, slightly sad website has made the trip from non-existence to international exposure. It’s called Dear Photograph, and its premise is simple: Take a picture of an old photo being carefully held up in front of the place it was originally taken, so it appears to be a window into the past.”

• miniBiography and the 99%. “David Lynch’s Interview Project,[is] an online series of short video documentaries centering on the lives of “normal” people across America. In Interview Project’s 121 mini-biographies, the filmmakers (including Lynch’s son Austin) ask complete strangers piercing, existential questions. It is a source of ever-renewed wonder that each stranger has an answer, and that the answers are so often so rich and brimming with hard-luck stories and lived experience.”

• Objects and Memory. “The documentary film Objects and Memory depicts experiences in the aftermath of 9/11 and other major historic events to reveal how, in times of stress, we join together in community and see otherwise ordinary things as symbols of identity, memory and aspiration. In its exploration of people preserving the past and speaking to the future, Objects and Memory invites us to think about the fundamental nature of human interaction.”  [Thanks to cj madigan of Shoebox Stories for alerting me to this item.]

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If I were able to go back to when I began as a personal historian, what’s the best advice I could give myself? Here’s what I’d say…Read more.

Don’t miss Reflections in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup. It’s a powerful reminder that behind every aged face there was once a younger self with dreams and ambitions. If you’re a serious blogger,  you’ll find some practical wisdom in 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging.

• Robert Caro’s Big Dig. “Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms.”

• Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love. “…when you are facing the unknown, they only way to know anything for sure is to act. When you are dealing with uncertainty — and whether you are going to make any money from your passion at this point is definitely an uncertainty — you act. You don’t think about what might happen, or try to predict the outcome, or plan for every contingency. You take a small step toward making it a reality, and you see what happens.”

• Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is For Everyone Now. “We need a new playbook,” says entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. “The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true.” The Start-Up of You, written by Casnocha and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, is that playbook. It argues that we can no longer expect to find a job, instead we must make our jobs. As Hoffman says, we have to “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs, it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”

• Reflections. A poignant reconstructed portrait series  where  older people gaze into a mirror at a reflection of their  younger selves . Created  by photographer Tom Husey.

• Social media self-promotion scheme draws authors including Margaret Atwood. “As bookshops teeter and publishers sway in the shifting landscape of the digital age, authors are being urged to go out and find their own readers by a new $20m (£12.5m) fund that will pay them a dollar for every book sold. With early adopters including Margaret Atwood and FlashForward author Robert Sawyer – who claimed the scheme would have added $20,000 to his income from audio over the past two years – the fund is being launched by digital audiobook site Audible at the London Book Fair this weekend.”

• Book Design: Choosing Your Paragraphing Style. “Anyone who wants to do their own book design can spend some very worthwhile time studying books that are old. I mean really old, like going all the way back to the beginning of printed books. Early on, I found these books and the book typography that’s used in them very stimulating when thinking about how I wanted the books I was working on to look.”

• 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging. “Ever since I started in business, I’ve always loved Seth Godin. He’s a brilliant marketer and a great writer. In fact, he runs one of the most popular blogs…And while many people view him as “America’s greatest marketer,” there is a lot to learn from him about blogging.”

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How much do we remember from our childhood? This is one of the questions examined recently by Canadian research scientists.

I’ve just finished reading Blanks for the Memories  which highlights aspects of the research originally published in the journal Child Development…Read more.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup there are many treats. If you’re a graphic designer,  I think you’ll love watching Print in Motion Winner: Medusa in Fragments.  For those who admire good craftsmanship, don’t miss  The Last Letterpress and Paper Store in Downtown Los Angeles. It’s a poignant video about what is being lost in our digital world.

• An Exceedingly Simple Guide to Keeping a Journal. “I have to confess: I’ve never been good at keeping a journal. Until this year…What has changed? I instituted a few “tricks” to keep the journaling simple, easy, and sustainable.”

• Memoir Writing Tips for Creating Story Structure and the Narrative Arc. “Memoir writers struggle with plot and structure for a very good reason: they think they know the plot. They assume that writing “what happened” is enough to create a memoir, and think that putting journal entries into the computer can be their memoir. A memoir is a story, created and constructed with skill and focus. It can be chronological or it might not be. Writing a memoir asks for you to dig deep into your biography and come up with scenes that bring a reader into your world fully and inspire them to keep reading–something about you and your story is relevant to their lives.Some tips for thinking about story and plot:”

• From Psalters to Downloads. “The MP3 is just the latest in a long line of ways of buying music. Tim de Lisle composes a short history …”

• Print in Motion Winner: Medusa in Fragments. [Video]“With so much stunning work being produced in the world of motion graphics these days, we wanted to invite the field’s artists to show off a bit. And so Print in Motion was born. We approached the competition with no real parameters other than to feature the most interesting and innovative work we could find, and to build a forum for designers eager to see—and be inspired by—what their peers are doing.We received many worthy entries, but eventually we whittled them down to 10 standouts, starting with this great piece titled Medusa in Fragments.”

• A Storytelling Lesson from South Park. [Video] “A while back I gave some tips for tightening stories. One of them was to watch out for “and then” syndrome. That is, if you find yourself saying “and then” a lot, what you have “may not actually be a story, but just a long sequence of events”…Then this weekend I came across this video of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone making the very same point. Only more eloquently. (And profanely, of course.)”

• Nelson Mandela’s life in a digital museum. “For a look at the future of digital museums, check out the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory’s new digital archive composed of thousands of scanned documents from the African leader’s life…But instead of scanning them and dumping them online for scholars to peruse, the center, with Google’s support, created a virtual museum experience — highlighting certain pieces from the archives, putting them in the context of Mandela’s life and then enabling a visitor to the site to go deeper if they’d like.”

• The Last Letterpress and Paper Store in Downtown Los Angeles. [Video] “ink&paper is a portrait of Aardvark Letterpress and McManus & Morgan Paper, neighboring businesses working together to survive in a digital era. The film was directed by Ben Proudfoot, a film student at U.S.C., and he describes the making of the film in a brief interview below.”

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