Tech options for making oral history recordings accessible

V1. January 30 2023

Hannah James Louwerse, Archives at NCBS

Making oral history recordings accessible to people has been infamously difficult, with the oral historian Michael Frisch referring to the issue as “oral history’s deep dark secret”. There have been many attempts to solve this problem with some being more successful than others. By analysing the history of oral history technologies one can see how using technology to access to oral history recordings depends on three factors: maintenance, ethics, and user-friendliness. This short report will go through each of these factors bringing examples of oral history technologies to explain what you should look for when seeking a solution to putting oral history recordings online.

  1. Maintenance

Maintenance is often the biggest killer of solutions to the deep dark secret of oral history. Maintenance depends on a continuous supply of money and labour, which is not always easy to get hold of, especially within grant cycles. It is therefore essential to think about the maintenance necessary to sustain a technology which allows access to oral history recordings. How you do this depends on the source of the technology and how it was developed. 

  1. Tailor-made, in house development and maintenance

Creating your own digital oral history archiving system allows it to be perfectly tailor to your collections needs. However, it also means the maintenance of this system is solely in your hands, which can be very risky, especially when working within grant cycles. Projects like the Visual Oral/Aural History Archive (VOAHA) created by Sherna Berger Gluck at California State University, Long Beach and Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database developed by Doug Boyd built tailor-made technologies specifically for their existing oral history collections, either developing the technology themselves or hired someone to do it for them. At the time they were the height of technology, but when the money ran out there was none left to maintain the archives/databases. Both VOAHA and Boyd’s Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database were “digitally abandoned” and left vulnerable to inevitable technical obsolescence and online hackers (Boyd and Larson, 2014, p. 7; Boyd, 2014, p. 90). In the end the two projects were absorbed by their respective universities’ libraries.

1.2   Use existing specialist oral history software

By using specialist oral history software, the maintenance is no longer your responsibility, which is both a risk and a benefit. The benefit is how it is a cheaper option in comparison to hiring someone full time to take care of the technology. But the risk is that the software developer stops maintaining the software, which is what happen in the case of Stories Matter, an oral history software developed by the Centre of Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University and a software engineer from Kamicode software (High, 2010; Jessee, Zembrycki, and High, 2011). The Kamicode website still has a page on Stories Matter, but the software is not downloadable. The reason for this is unclear, however it is easy to imagine the maintaining of such niche software is unlikely to be a high priority for a software company.

A more successful example of specialist oral history software is Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), developed by Doug Boyd after his reflections on Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database. OHMS has been in existence for some years and is a popular way for oral history projects and archives to organise their oral history metadata and link the video/audio file to a searchable text. Unlike Stories Matter, OHMS is developed and maintained by people who are interested in oral history and use it for their own projects. Maintaining OHMS is therefore in their own interest.

1.3 Use existing mainstream third party platforms

Another cheaper option is using more mainstream platforms such as Soundcloud or Spotify. These are less niche technologies and therefore do not have the benefits more specialised software has, but the maintenance is pretty much guaranteed since these platforms are universally used. Certain projects have created Spotify playlists and other have Soundcloud versions of their recordings alongside the original files in the brick-and-mortar archive.

  • Ethics

The internet is an ethical nightmare and putting someone’s personal story online in an ethical manner is not an easy task. The starting point will always be clear communication to the interviewees on how people will be able to access their recording, and thorough paperwork which accompanies the recording. Following this there are a couple of other things people have done to support the ethical handling of oral history recordings.

2.1 Extracts

The simplest of ethical practices is to only make certain extracts available online. This means you can avoid putting online more sensitive information but still give an example to the archive visitor of the kind of content the oral history holds. If the archive visitor wishes to hear more, they can request the full recording via email. A possible consequence of this might be people only using the online extract and not bother enquiring any further because it is deemed as “too much effort.”

2.2 End user agreement

Archives like Trove and Centre for Brooklyn History have “end user agreements” the archive visitor must agree to before they are allowed access to the oral history recording. These end user agreements contain information on basic copyright and data rights, a disclaimer about the opinions expressed in the recording, and outline the archive user’s obligations. These obligations include correctly citing the recording, adhering copyright law and data protection law. These end user agreements are a way for archives to hold users accountable in case of misuse or rights violations.

  • User-friendliness

People have a low tolerance of bad user-experience design. The software Interclipper, championed by Michael Frisch was reviewed during the development of Stories Matter and VOAHA and was deemed difficult to use in both instances (Jessee, Zembrycki, and High, 2011; Gluck, 2014). It no longer exists. OHMS offers both a backend metadata synchronizer and a viewer, the latter however is often left in favour of an in-house interface design. Project Jukebox developed by the University of Alaska in collaboration with Apple Computers Inc. in the 1990s, is still available online but still looks like it was made in the 90s, even though at the time it was described as “a fantastic jump into space age technology” (Lake, 1991, p. 30). It is therefore important the user experience and interface are updated as fashions and taste evolve across the wider internet.

List of examples

Bibliography

Boyd, D.A. (2014) ““I Just Want to Click on It to Listen”: Oral History Archives, Orality, and Usability” in Oral History and Digital Humanities. pp. 77-96. Palgrave Macmillan: New York

Boyd, D.A. and Larson, M. (2014) “Introduction” in Oral History and Digital Humanities. pp. 1-16. Palgrave Macmillan: New York

Gluck, S.B. (2014) “Why do we call it oral history? Refocusing on orality/aurality in the digital age” in Oral History and Digital Humanities. pp. 35-52. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

High, S. (2010) “Telling stories: A reflection on oral history and new media” in Oral History. 38(1), pp.101-112

Jessee, E., Zembrzycki, S. and High, S. (2011) “Stories Matter: Conceptual challenges in the development of oral history database building software” In Forum: Qualitative Social Research. 12(1)

Lake, G.L. (1991)  “Project Jukebox: An Innovative Way to Access and Preserve Oral History Records” in Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists. 9(1), pp.24-41

Smith, S. (Oct 1991) “Project Jukebox: ‘We Are Digitizing Our Oral History Collection… and We’re Including a Database.’” at The Church Conference: Finding Our Way in the Communication Age. pp. 16 – 24. Anchorage, AK

OHD_RPT_0256 Options for making oral histories accessible
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