Accessing the Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection

Abstract

The 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.