Much of oral history does not constitute "research" under federal guidelines. Such is the case of just collecting random stories. For oral history projects, IRB approval is necessary only if you are attempting to test a hypothesis or otherwise using an explicit theoretical framework to generalize from your data.

For example, if you are interviewing Vietnam War veterans and you intend to use the material you collected to test a thesis about the nature of memory among war veterans, that would be Research, because you are trying to draw a general conclusion from the data you collect.  Interviewing Vietnam War veterans just to learn something about what they think about the war does not count as “research” under the guidelines.