Oral History in Your Library by Cyns Nelson

Author:Cyns Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Functionality

The previous chapter made the case for transcribing interviews—including time stamps—and at least summarizing or indexing the content. The utility of these efforts is fully shown with the simultaneous presentation of a play function for audio/video plus a typed transcript/index. Hopefully, the recording quality of the audio is high, but if that’s not the case, a transcript can help make the content clear. A user can be listening to the interview and following along with the transcript. Also, and much more common: With the simultaneous display of document and sound, researchers can scan the transcript for portions most relevant to their specific interest, and then immediately navigate to those spots of the recorded interview—this accomplished without shifting between web pages. Ideally, the presentation of the transcript/summary will also have a full-text searching option, akin to the “find” function associated with Word documents. If a researcher is looking for the mention of a particular name, that word can be located throughout the interview, correlated with points in the conversation.

One application for enhancing the accessibility of the recorded interview/transcript/index is called Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS).3 Using this application, your transcript or index can be synchronized with the original recording. Then, a researcher would not need to manually navigate to specific portions of the original recording; time stamps would be synched with the audio, and clicking the stamp on the web-displayed transcript would take you to that moment in the interview. The same thing could happen for words in the transcript—or, in the case of an OHMS-doctored index, a user could be jumped to summarized portions of the interview. OHMS is available for free and open-source distribution, so the investment on your part would be one of extra time in learning and configuring the system, and then further processing your materials to utilize the technology.

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