Building digital oral history collections

This workshop is intended for professionals working on or planning to work on digital oral history collections or archives. It is an opportunity to engage the audience in activities to share ideas and to experience with one another methods regarding digital oral history collection. The workshop enables the audience to acquire and share new skills in archiving oral history and to standardize the schema and the practices used by the partners of AMICAL and for better inter-operability between the digital repositories.

Oral history Interviews are considered primary sources communicated by a participant in or a witness to an event or a period of time in the history of a nation. It helps researchers to a better understanding of the past by giving access to the recorded interviews in addition to other contextual materials such as photographs, notes, maps and other relative materials.

The workshop consists of teaching participants how to archive both digitized and born digital oral history collections. It will include discussions, presentation and hands-on on how to setup and access the open source oral history metadata synchronizer (OHMS), which enables data entry of the metadata that describes each segment of the digital object (video or audio recording interviews) through segmentation module, and how to export the metadata of the digital file. The exported files, in xml and csv formats, will be mapped to a standardized descriptive Metadata Schema, the Dublin Core, to describe the digital collection that will be uploaded into a digital repository or a Content Management System (CMS) for discovery and better access and retrieval of the Oral History Digital Collection.

The workshop will also include the guidance on how to apply the Dublin Core Metadata elements to describe the interviews (Title, interviewer, interviewee, abstract, keywords, type and format) of the digital object, and the importance of using controlled vocabularies or a thesaurus (as an indexing tool) which helps in the consistency in using keywords describing the different segments of the interview and in the retrieval of information about the subjects of the interviews.