Oral history, as a historical resource, has traditionally been very difficult to use for both casual and serious researchers. Simply putting oral histories online is certainly nothing new. Many institutions are providing access to their transcripts or the audio/video interviews online as either full interviews are as interview excerpts. However, the digital archival platforms being used by most institutions were designed to serve up digital photographs and manuscript materials. Users can search the transcripts and you can browse the audio or video but you cannot link your transcript search to specific locations in the audio or video. Last year the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, in partnership with the Kentuckiana Digital Library, developed a cutting edge method of delivering oral history online. With our development of the OHMS synchronizing application and its deployment on the Kentuckiana Digital Library, we have empowered users to search for text and link to the corresponding place in the audio interview. Now we have successfully applied this technology to our video interviews. We have launched the interface with our From Combat to Kentucky Oral History Project (C2Ky) giving users the ability to search by keyword in the transcript and jump to the correlate in the video interview. I will talk about the C2Ky project in a future post. Check it out online and let us know what you think.
Oral Histories on the KDL
