I was grateful to have the opportunity this year to conduct and process my own oral history interview for the first time through the course LIBR 588: Theory and Practice of Oral History. Combined with some prior research into metadata for audiovisual resources, I was inspired to incorporate my interview into my final project for my Metadata course. I soon discovered the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, a system developed by researchers at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, and chose to experiment with its Metadata Editor, transcript synchronization function, and Index module.
Fig. 1: The Metadata Editor in the OHMS Application
I was also lucky to be working on an interview with a narrator who spoke at length about Cantonese identity in his interview and intermittently used Cantonese while speaking. This gave me a valuable opportunity to take a look at the bilingual functionality offered by the OHMS system and explore other projects that have been able to enhance discoverability and access with these features.
Fig. 2: The Index module in the OHMS application
My final project, A Guide to OHMS: Expanding Metadata and Indexing Capabilities for Oral History Projects, goes into much more detail about my experience using OHMS and provides some context around the current landscape of oral history metadata. You can view and read more about my interview with narrator Mark Lee, which explores the relationship between food and identity, on The 2020 (Re)Collection exhibit page here.
The full transcript and segment index is available as a PDF here: