Early this year, Alexander Street Press embarked on an ambitious initiative to create an online index to English-language oral histories from around the world and dubbed it Oral History Online. Our goals are simple – to provide scholars, students, and lay people a quick way to find oral histories specific to their needs, and to give users click-through access to the interviews if they are available on the Internet.

Background

As we developed an index called North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories, which was launched in 2002, the need for a general index to oral histories was made all too clear. This landmark collection contains some 100,000 pages dealing with all aspects of immigration and, as oral history is a preeminent source for information for immigrants, the index inspired both our editors and librarian customers to conceive of Oral History Online.

In our discussions, librarians outlined a number of issues with the existing ways of handling this material:

• It is not possible to easily identify what oral histories are available.
• Existing search engines on the Internet yield too many results to be useful and often point to materials of doubtful provenance.
• Even where oral histories are posted on the Web, citations lack page numbers and other information that would make citing them possible.
• Cataloging for oral histories is often missing or inconsistent.
• Some of the best and most important interviews are inaccessible.

This – to put it mildly – is a sad state of affairs. Oral histories offer access to voices that are heard virtually nowhere else. For minorities and the generally disenfranchised they are one of the main modes of expression. If this material cannot be accessed, these groups are silenced.

At the same time, both librarians and scholars recognize the growing importance of audio and video for students. And, students at all levels now expect to be able to access more than the simple text. Even more importantly, there is growing recognition of the importance of personal narrative for scholarship in disciplines of history, psychology, sociology, and literature.

Oral History Online responds to these needs. So far, the project has identified approximately 3,200 collections with more than 330,000 interviews. More than 300,000 pages of transcribed material have been found on the Internet, along with 600 or so video files and 1,600 audio files.

Selection

Producing an index of this kind requires both attention to detail and adherence to editorial principles. At our office in Alexandria, Virginia, we have a team of librarians who are selecting, reading, and indexing material for inclusion.

Our goal is to balance the interests of our customers with the wishes of narrators and their interviewers. Some histories have been posted on the Internet without the permission of the copyright holders. Still others are editorially suspect or tampered with. Finally, there are materials that should not be published for ethical reasons —even where permission has been secured, the nature of the material may dictate that it remain private. We are sensitive to these issues. For collections from North America, we will look for evidence that the OHA collection guidelines have been followed. In other cases, we will be looking to our editorial advisors and local associations for assistance.

Our advisory board, which is even now changing to include other leading oral historians from the US and overseas, currently includes:

• Elinor Mazé, senior editor and lecturer, Baylor University Institute for Oral History.
• Chuck Bolton, former director and current co-director of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, University of Southern Mississippi.

Technical Details

To see how Oral History Online will work, please visit the guided tour on our website at http://alexanderstreet.com. The basic aim of the project is to allow users to conduct a search according to a number of criteria and then click through to a collection, transcript, audio file, or video file at various repositories around the world.

We will index on several levels, depending on what the repositories make available to us. For some collections, the index will simply indicate the repository name and the approximate size of the collection. For others, the index will include interviewer details. And for still others, the index will include full details of each interview and links to audio and video files.

Users will be able to search for collections by more than twelve fields, including time period, name, subject, and place of interview. This will make it possible for them to search with a high level of specificity – for example, users may retrieve all interviews from the 1980s that discuss the New Deal, written by narrators born in Oklahoma.

The database includes specialized tables of contents that allow users to see the interviews in myriad ways. For example, we have a table that links to interviews pertaining to a list of historical events.

We will also be measuring the number of click-throughs so that we can gauge which collections and individual interviews are most popular.

Free Directory of Oral History Collections

Our intention is to make the entire directory of collections we’ve identified available to the general public as a free service. On launch early in January, we expect to have about 2,500 collections listed on our website.

If you’d like to see if we’ve identified your collection already— and to check that we have the correct information — please go to the Alexander Street website. If you don’t find your collection there, or if you have information to correct, we would appreciate your using the online form to update us.

If your collection isn’t registered with us, please consider registering today. There is no cost to you, and registering will generate a good deal of attention for the materials in your possession. Our experience has been that professors and teachers use our products to create lesson plans with links – so registering with us is an easy way to drive additional traffic to your website and support lines of study and research that draw or focus on the materials in your collection.

There are 3 ways that you can let us know what you have:

1. Complete the online registration form at www.alexanderstreet.com/orhi
2. Send us your latest catalog
3. E-mail our editor, Laura Gosling, at gosling@alexanderstreet.com

If you have more detailed, interview-level records, please send those as well. We can accept them in a wide range of formats, including general MARC and comma-delimited. The more records we have, the more opportunities there are for users to learn about your collections.

How to get the index

We expect to launch the full Oral History Online database early in 2004. It will include both collection-level and interview-level records, along with links to accompanying transcripts, audio files, and video files.

The index will be sold as an Internet subscription service to libraries and individuals around the world. Prices are expected to range from $250 for a small library or individual to approximately $2,000 for large institutions.

Our aim is to produce a resource that oral historians around the world will come to rely on, so please feel free to send us your comments and feedback as the collection develops. Visit our website at http://alexanderstreet.com to learn more about Oral History Online and Alexander Street Press.

© Copyright 2008 Alexander Street Press. All rights reserved.                 Last Updated: 05-Mar-2008