I have been over my head in recent months working on grant proposals and the like. Among our major projects (my head hurts to have to say, “among” our major projects) we are working on an online archive for oral histories.

You’d think that this would be no big deal. We should be able to convert everything from tape or minidisk or video to mp3 and mpeg, upload it to the Internet Archive or YouTube and be done with it. In fact, we have uploaded some of our resources to Flickr and YouTube, and they regularly attract attention. We’ll do more of it.

But, think for a minute. Can you find the podcast that someone mentioned a year ago? What was popular on YouTube at that time and can you find it today? Is it even online any more? Do you have all of the mp3s that you have acquired over the last five years? (Do you even have all of the devices on which you stored those mp3s?)

More important: Is the purpose of an archive to throw files that can be used by today’s web browsers and media players over the transom and then to move on? For us, this is an especially sensitive question because we don’t have physical assets that people can continue to view and appreciate. We’re a digital-only archive.

Okay. Straw person. Of course we can’t just dump stuff over the transom and move on. Here are some of the things we wrestle with:

First, all of our oral histories have to be digitized (or, in the case of our minidisks, stored in generally accessible digital formats, not unique silos) in file formats (we use .wav for audio; .avi for video) that preserve as much of the original data as possible. We’ll want to know a lot about these oral histories—Who interviewed whom? When? Where? What was discussed (subjects, locations, times)? What tools were used and where are the masters? (What do we need to know to preserve these recordings?) What rights to we have to share this oral history? Some items will be dark—inaccessible until some time after the respondent’s death, or in some cases, accessible only to researchers. (Who gets to listen to/view these histories? Oh, when we put them into the archive, there better be some reliable security….)

Once the files are digitized, they need to be backed up and storied in multiple locations (although LOCKSS—lots of copies keep stuff safe—applies, we also know that DVDs and CD ROMs have no trustable integrity as long term storage media, so we need to keep things live on multiple servers in multiple locations if we want to sleep well at night. Thank goodness for Amazon’s S3.). Ouch. There’s an ongoing money-sink right there.

To make the recordings useful, they need to be transcribed, then the transcriptions need to be checked and edited, significant passages noted, discussion topics, significant locations, dates, noted.

Once we have all of these pieces in hand, we want people to be able to use them over the web. This is a relatively new concern. In the bad old days, we assumed that people would come to us, during our convenient-to-us (or whatever we could afford) open hours. Now, we can put information on the web, 24×7. We can use relatively lightweight formats—file formats that use minimal bandwidth—so that people can listen and view without having the most sophisticated computers and massive bandwidth. Down the road there will be new standards—on the side we are currently re-digitizing a lot of old RealMedia and old Windows Media Files so that people can download smaller files and hear/see better recordings. These were state of the art ten years ago. We’ll roll new ones from the masters, I am sure, in another ten years or less, again. This time, though, we’ll have digital masters to work from.

But, we’re not putting these materials on the web as an intellectual exercise. Our respondents tell stories that we want to share. So, we have to work on the interface—how do we make these recordings easy to find, easy to put in context, easy to use in slide shows and multimedia presentations so that these women’s voices become and remain parts of our lives? For that we are currently working on a slew of web2.0 (and beyond) technologies using open source standards for everything from RSS feeds (so people can find out easily when we add new materials) to tagging (so people can tell us what the significant terms to them are for each recording), comments (so people can share thoughts, related items, additional context), and beyond. We need to provide ways for people who hear a podcast excerpted from one or more oral histories to find the complete interviews and related materials. (Did I mention that we need to listen to these Oral Histories and create excerpts—podcasts–that highlight the lives and issues and themes from the histories, so that there are entry points, ways to use excerpts, ways to discover critical insights and experiences?) Eventually, we are even hoping for affordable technology that lets us link between audio/video and the transcript—can’t make out what someone said? Call up the transcript in a window. Found a fascinating statement in a transcript? Listen/Watch how it was originally said, in context.

So, yeah, we could dump a bunch of mp3s on the web. But we’re an archive. Our mission is not just to uncover, document, and disseminate these stories, but to ensure that they reach people, and that they continue to reach people as close to forever as we can plan for, in ways that we don’t know even know how to imagine yet, down the road. Given how much we’re able to do, and how those capabilities keep expanding, I have to say that it is good, not a curse, to live in interesting times.

But sometimes, ohhhh, my head….

Ari

P.S. If there are sites that you think make Oral Histories especially accessible, comment here and spread the word—to me, and all of us.

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