Making oral history accessible over the World Wide Web

Abstract

We describe a multimedia, WWW-based oral history collection constructed from off-the-shelf or publicly available software. The source materials for the collection include audio tapes of interviews and summary transcripts of each interview, as well as photographs illustrating episodes mentioned in the tapes. Sections of the transcripts are manually matched to associated segments of the tapes, and the tapes are digitized. Users search a full-text retrieval system based on the text transcripts to retrieve relevant transcript sections and their associated audio recordings and photographs. It is also possible to search for photos by matching text queries against text descriptions of the photos in the collection, where the located photos link back to their respective interview transcript and audio recordings.