OHMS for Voces: Where Technology Meets History

The Voces Oral History Project has an extensive collection of Latino oral history recorded interviews, available at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collections. Journalistic treatments of those interviews have long been a hallmark of the Voces website. But Voces wished to share the original recorded interview with a wider audience. We not only needed to make this available to a public audience but wanted to do so inexpensively and efficiently. UT Libraries was tasked to assist Voces in creating a solution to empower them to be self-sufficient in creating and maintaining the content. The University of Kentucky Libraries has created a web-based, system called OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) to inexpensively and efficiently enhance access to oral history online. OHMS provides users a word-level search capability and a time-correlated transcripts. It also is capable of providing an indexed interview connecting the textual search term to the corresponding moment in the recorded interview online. UT Libraries hosted the OHMS viewer for the Voces project while implementing a workflow that is easy and repeatable for the business users.