Expanding Indexing and Metadata Capabilities for Oral History Projects
For my final project in my Metadata course, I wrote this practical guide to the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), a set of tools that enables users to easily create segment indexes and metadata records for oral history projects.
There were two goals in constructing this guide:
- Highlight the advocatory nature of oral history, and demonstrate how developments in metadata and digital resource management can aid practitioners in assessing access to their collections
- Provide a walkthrough of the metadata creation and indexing possibilities of the OHMS system by drawing on my own experience using the toolkit
By offering a plain language demonstration of the OHMS application, I hope to empower potential users at any technical comfort level—students, student workers, instructors, cultural heritage project organizers, library staff, etc.—to describe and process their oral history projects so that they can reach their intended audiences.
Included in the guide are examples of the many uses of OHMS for audiovisual projects that don’t necessarily fall within the spectrum of oral history, and links to other resources that can aid in these types of projects.
View or download the guide here: