Balancing Access and Privacy in Oral History

The good news about posting a podcast is that everyone can access it.  You can reach a very wide audience.

The bad news about posting a podcast is that everyone can access it. You might not want a completely unrestrained audience.  

So, the question is - how / where do you create a page for a podcast so that it’s easy to access and others can see it.  But, if you are doing oral history, it protects the privacy of those who were interviewed.

This is part of a bigger problem oral historians face as they move oral histories to the Internet — oral histories that were conducted decades ago, before the Internet was imagined. 

WordPress offers a couple of options:

1. Password protect the entire blog.  The disadvantage is that each individual who wants to view the blog has to have an individual account with WordPress.  As the administrator, you have to enter each person’s Login ID to allow them to see the blog.  This can be time consuming, especially if you want a large audience to be able to view the page with the podcast.
2. Password protect a single page using a single password.  With this approach, as the administrator, you send the same password to everyone you want to have access to the page.  Something you can probably accomplish with a mass email.