Douglas A. Boyd

OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free

Abstract A recent effort at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries has sought to make using oral histories online more efficient and fluid. The Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), a web-based system, provides users with word-level search capability and a time-correlated transcript or index, connecting the textual search term to the corresponding moment in the recorded interview online. This article reflects on the creation of OHMS and recent attempts to address its two original shortcomings: its inability to handle untranscribed interviews and its incompatibility with archives beyond the Kentucky Digital Library.

Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research: Using OHMS to “Compose History” in the Writing Classroom

Abstract This article presents a case study about a recent collaboration between the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and a professor at the University of Kentucky to use the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)—an open source, free online application originally designed for enhancing archival access to oral history—as a pedagogical tool to elevate student engagement with oral history in the classroom. The authors—the oral history center director and creator of OHMS; a professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies (WRD); and an undergraduate WRD student assigned the task of using OHMS to index oral history—reflect on this collaboration from their own perspectives. This collaboration between the archive and the classroom at the University of Kentucky provides an innovative, experiential learning model for engaging undergraduate students in the critical thinking and research aspects of working with oral history, and the article reflects on the impact and potential for future applications of this model.

“I Just Want to Click on It to Listen”: Oral History Archives, Orality, and Usability

In 1978, Paul Thompson stated that “the tape recorder not only allows history to be taken down in spoken words but also presented through them … The words may be idiosyncratically phrased, but all the more expressive for that. They breathe life into history.”1 Like many others, I was drawn to oral history by the power, emotion, and the content conveyed in the recorded voice, the expression of first hand memories tangled up in the engagement of an interview, culminating as recorded narrative performance. Folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein began the influential book A Guide for Field Workers in Folklore with the reminder, “The basis of any scholarly discipline is the materials with which it deals. Without such materials there can be no subject for scholarship.” 2 The professional field of oral history consists of scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds. What consistently unifies this group is the “material with which it deals”: the recorded voice, the interview. We have staunchly defended oral history’s relevance and reliability through the decades, yet, with few exceptions, the orality/aurality that defined our material was consistently stripped away in the textual act of archival use and scholarly communication.

Sustainable Stewardship: A Collaborative Model for Engaged Oral History Pedagogy, Community Partnership, and Archival Growth

Abstract Our University of Kentucky team of professors, archivists, and oral historians have collaborated since 2013 to develop pedagogy that enables students to encounter and engage oral history, archival materials, and local community in meaningful ways. Through the impetus of the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project and several semesters of collaboration and iterative syllabus design, we developed “sustainable stewardship” as a replicable model for course and project design to engage undergraduates in original knowledge production while simultaneously fostering archival access and growth. In this article we trace the evolving pedagogical conversations inspired by the classroom introduction of OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer), the questions of continuity they elicit, and our team’s development of sustainable stewardship to respond to those questions. We argue that sustainable stewardship provides a model to connect the classroom, community, and the archive in enduring, mutually beneficial, and transformative ways.