As a beginning practitioner of oral history, I’d like to take advantage of THATcamp to assemble some do’s and don’ts of organizing oral history projects in support of public history pedagogy generally and the Curatescape application specifically.   Many of the workshops suggested sound profitable in answering questions about collaboration, creative re-use, etc.  Although we’ve only worked on a few oral history projects at Allegheny, we’re already running into problems with compatible formats, archiving and access.   Rather than just jumping in on my project with some solution that will work for the moment, I’d like to come up with some ways that lay solid foundations and make it possible for the oral histories to be useful resources beyond my immediate project.  I’m especially interested in setting up a system that utilizes undergraduate interns on an on-going basis in a summer program for which we’re getting funding.  Perhaps a panel might consist of you experts answering such questions as:  if I were starting over again I would be sure to do ____.  Or, more helpfully, boy would I never again do ____.    Some of my questions will be answered by my sitting in on other sessions, or we could take some time out to create a list of suggestions of best practices that consolidate what we’ve learned.

I’m thinking most right now about ways to invite and encourage the creation of oral histories and other documentary records for the archives by a huge variety of participants while maintaining rigorous professional and scholarly standards in my institution’s practices.  In other words:

How do we strike a balance between making participation appealing and simple while maintaining quality control over the records we’re collecting?

I would really enjoy learning more about the ways other THATCampers have mobilized participants new to oral history and digital archives to produce wonderful contributions.

Hello:

I would be interested in a session on adding geospatial information, which would allow locating and collocating digital oral histories on such maps as HistoryPin.  Given its timeline feature, it may support establishing relationships between recordings and other digital content.  In the Veterans History Project, geographical locations are provided for the location service — albeit very generally, such as Korean War, Vietnam War — and the interviewees’ state of residence, but this is less clear for World War I and II topics.  If Digital History aims at providing such data at a greater granularity, specifics should be added, which would provide historians with additional leads to support research on very specific topics.  However, not all oral histories (I mean both the recording and transcript) may be published digitally if the interviewees do not agree to such publications, so a more diversified strategy may be needed.   For recordings with permissions, the geo-tags and other key words should adequately describe the media.  If the transcript is also published (with the interviewees’ and interviewers’ permission), perhaps TEI should be used to add the geo-location in body of the transcript as well.  This approach will require extensive textual analysis, but it may well be worthwhile.  For oral histories without either the transcripts or recording or both accessible online, the catalog record should contain this information in greater detail, and researchers may still be able to listen to the recordings, read transcripts, and develop a map with geographical locations mentioned in the interviews. The MARC standard used by libraries,  EAD in use at archives, and the various metadata schemas like Dublin Core have fields for geographic locations to accommodate such enhancements.  I hope to see an interdisciplinary group of archivists, digital historians, geographers, and librarians in such a session if possible.