SCUA
has a long tradition of conducting and preserving oral history interviews with
faculty, administrators, students, and alumni from across the University’s
history. These interviews, which typically are an hour or more in length,
provide in-depth information about an interviewee’s contributions to and
viewpoint on specific time periods or events in campus history. A recent focus
has been on documenting the experiences of African American students during the
1960s and 1970s. Often these interviews provide valuable personal insight into
history in a way that the official university records cannot.
Currently,
access to these oral histories is provided primarily through the interview
transcript (the word-for-word text of the interview). Audio recordings are
available on CD if requested, but access to these recordings is not provided
online. The transcripts are among the highest ranked downloads from across the University
Libraries’ digital collections, yet the process of finding relevant information
within the transcripts is often challenging due to their lengthy nature.
This
project will utilize an open-source tool (the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, developed by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at
the University of Kentucky Libraries) to
provide access to oral history audio recordings online and time-synch the audio
recordings to existing transcripts. This will allow researchers to more readily
search each oral history recording for relevant information and quickly skip to
certain key topics discussed in the interview. At the conclusion of the project
in June 2015, it is anticipated that at least 25 enhanced oral history audio recordings
and accompanying transcripts will be made available to researchers online. Additionally,
the project will establish a workflow for providing enhanced access to
additional oral history interviews in SCUA.
Created
by Dean Rosann Bazirjian in 2009 and first awarded in 2010, the objective of
the Innovation and Program Enrichment Grant is to provide one-time funding of
up to $2,500 for projects that will innovatively enhance and expand library
services and programs.
