Browsing by Subject "oral history"
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Item Accessing the Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection(2015-04-27) Garza, Jose Javier; MD Anderson Cancer CenterThe Historical Resources Center of the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center has been collecting oral history interviews since 2000. With over sixty participants and several hundred hours of interview footage, the archives is using the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) and CONTENTdm (CDM) to facilitate access to the interview collection. Since 2009, the archives began experimenting with various platforms to ensure access to both audio and text version of the oral history interviews while protecting the privacy of MD Anderson faculty, staff, and patients. The entire oral history collection is described using an internal coding scheme to allow cross-referencing among key topics in the interviews. After consideration, the archives believes that combination of OHMS as the delivery platform and CDM as the searching tool will create a searchable ecosystem that provides access to the interviews will preserving internal metadata structure of the interviews.Item Designing a Griotte for the Global Village: Increasing the Evidentiary Value of Oral Histories for Use in Digital Libraries(2011-10-21) Dunn, Rhonda ThayerA griotte in West African culture is a female professional storyteller, responsible for preserving a tribe's history and genealogy by relaying its folklore in oral and musical recitations. Similarly, Griotte is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to foster collaboration between tradition bearers, subject experts, and computer specialists in an effort to build high quality digital oral history collections. To accomplish this objective, this project preserves the primary strength of oral history, namely its ability to disclose "our" intangible culture, and addresses its primary criticism, namely its dubious reliability due to reliance on human memory and integrity. For a theoretical foundation and a systematic model, William Moss's work on the evidentiary value of historical sources is employed. Using his work as a conceptual framework, along with Semantic Web technologies (e.g. Topic Maps and ontologies), a demonstrator system is developed to provide digital oral history tools to a "sample" of the target audience(s). This demonstrator system is evaluated via two methods: 1) a case study conducted to employ the system in the actual building of a digital oral history collection (this step also created sample data for the following assessment), and 2) a survey which involved a task-based evaluation of the demonstrator system. The results of the survey indicate that integrating oral histories with documentary evidence increases the evidentiary value of oral histories. Furthermore, the results imply that individuals are more likely to use oral histories in their work if their evidentiary value is increased. The contributions of this research ? primarily in the area of organizing metadata on the World Wide Web ? and considerations for future research are also provided.Item Digital Collections in a Small Archives: Using Google Services to Help Present and Promote An Oral History Project(2014-03-14) Wolfe, Erin; University of KansasProviding online access to media collections, such as oral histories, can be challenging to do well, particularly for smaller institutions with limited resources. This presentation will focus on a recently completed project in which the Dole Archives leveraged freely available tools to provide access to a high profile oral history collection in a variety of formats, including streaming audio/video, full text searching capabilities, and a finding aid with direct links to digital content. By integrating Google services into our own website, the project receives benefits both from (a) local branding and exhibit/content hosting and (b) the increase of visibility of the materials to a wider audience through Google-based searches. Designed with end-user access in mind, it is our hope that this project will help to expand our audiences beyond the academic and be useful (and usable) for a variety of purposes, from K-12 student research to serving as a case study for future fundraising opportunities. This presentation should be of interest to institutions looking for a low-cost approach to providing online access to media collections or those who may be interested in seeing a new approach to using web-based tools to provide access to archival materials.Item Voices from Small Places(2015-04-27) Snowden, Kelley; Beisel, Perky; Reynolds, Linda; Stephen F. Austin State UniversityWhen the economic power of a small rural community declines, there’s still value in the social history that defines a place. Researchers at Stephen F. Austin State University help communities preserve and pass on what’s most important about the places they’ve called home. Voices from Small Places focuses on documenting and preserving the history of small places (population under 100) found throughout East Texas. It uses a unique combination of methods to create a multidimensional history including photovoice, oral history interviews, a site survey, and the development of a digital collection. Using these methods the history of these small communities is documented and made available to the public. In addition to providing information for research, by documenting the history of these small places and placing them back into the larger historical narrative, East Texas is better understood as a region.