The Nunn Center has worked hard over the years to adapt to emerging technologies exploring ways to more efficiently and effectively deliver oral histories online. As an avid IPhone and IPad user, I have been interested in looking at ways we could deploy oral histories via mobile devices. Initially, I was not completely convinced that users would want to watch video oral history interviews on a smart phone since the screen sizes were so small and the length of interviews were typically fairly lengthy. However, I quickly changed my tune when I connected to the internet for the first time on my, IPad. This category of mobile device will greatly increase users’ expectation (of archives of all types and sizes) to use the archival material in a mobile digital environment. My one frustration with the IPad has been the digital void created online when Apple abandoned Adobe Flash for delivering video on its mobile devices. Users are commonly faced with a large “X” over the video that they hoped to view on their mobile device. Not happy with frustration, the Nunn Center team has focused energies on adapting once more.
Using our From Combat to Kentucky website, a video-based oral history project with student veterans here in Kentucky, we successfully deployed an HTML 5 mobile video solution to enable a more universal video delivery solution for our oral history interviews online. As of last week, we successfully tweaked our C2Ky interface to deliver video interviews to mobile devices such as the IPhone as well as the IPad. Over time, we will be investigating ways to apply this technology to our larger video holdings online, so stay tuned!