Let’s add educational materials here!  Please email me (natalie.milbrodt@queenslibrary.org) attachments of your syllabi or workshop outlines.  You can also post good workshop exercises in the comments section of this post.

Queens College undergraduate oral history course This course was co-taught by an English professor and an Archives Professor with help from me (Natalie) to get students ready to create interviews for donation to the Queens Memory Project.

Queens College undergraduate Sociology research methods course This is an outline for a six-session oral history curriculum module training students to conduct interviews about food and healing traditions that will become part of the Queens Memory Project.

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.

According to the Omeka web site:

Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog.

So, does that mean I can use it for my projects?

I plan to do an overview of Omeka, what you need to install it, how you can use it, how you can create web sites.

Omeka is widely used in the digital humanities. Come and see if it can work for you.

I believe that playing back digital video on the web presents a special set issues for scholars, content managers and technologists that are not often addressed in commercial products and on websites, such as YouTube, that focus primarily on entertainment not education, research or public exhibits. Using digital video in these areas requires the ability to segment videos, provide voice or text based annotation and the presentation of the segments in the context of the original video as well as the ability to present video segments and annotation with other related videos. In addition, since much of this work is done in the context of a library, museum or other public facility or project, and often requires some search and discovery of the video segments, the ability to collect and present metadata about each segment is important as well.  In relation to work that I have done on a plugin and themes that allow the loading and playback of videos and video segments into Omeka, I would like to discuss the current state of video segment playback and some of the choices that have to be made when playing back video on the web.