Oral History Reading Response
Reading “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free” by Doug Boyd provided a glimpse at what the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries went through to create a software, Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), useful to their field and open to the public.
They dealt with the challenges of transcription, indexing, time code markers, and other aspects of digitizing oral interviews. Boyd discusses these challenges and how the OHMS solved these issues. By making it an open source project, it makes it easier for other institutions and/or individuals to use this software. There is still improvements to be made to this software as automatic speech recognition and artificial intelligence improve. It can be used in various content management systems as a plugin like Omeka, Drupal, CONTENTdm, just to name a few.
I realized with this software plugin, I could possibly use this in my project. I don’t want to use every software that we learn about in this class in my project but I think this could be a bonus for my users to contribute their work to the history/telling their experiences of the Great Potato Famine or their ancestors emigrating to America. I need to look into this software some more and see how to add it to my website but this could be a great addition to make it more interactive.
As I started reading the second article, “Designing a National Online Oral History Collecting Initiative: The Occupational Folklore Project at the American Folklife Center” by Nancy Groce and Bertram Lyons, I realized that putting the OHMS plugin on my website won’t be as simple as 1-2-3. In this article, Groce and Lyons discuss the steps they completed at the Library of Congress to make oral history interviews available to the public. They outlined steps to completing an interview along with possible interview questions, forms, waivers, etc. Although this is one way of conducting an oral history project, it raises the questions of what should I include in my project? I believe my Contribution form could help users not only download stories and/images but possible audio files as well.
Both articles gave me an understanding of one aspect of digitizing oral interviews. I thought that it was just interviewing a person, making a transcript, and putting it on the web. Yes that is what these two articles are doing but it’s so much more than that. It’s making sure that not only are the audio files and transcripts are available but also the best way to search/index, is it intuitive to submit an oral interview? and how to make it available to the public that they would want to use their software. There are some positive aspects to put it online as explained above but also some negative ones as well. Making sure there is enough storage, having the audio files submitted in the correct format, making sure the data entered by the interviewer is accurate, etc. Digitizing oral history is a complex process but it will be invaluable to future researchers.