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Summertime

It's funny when you work in academics, and so many people assume you have summers off. Summers end up being the busiest time of the year for me for a few reasons. I may have less meetings with the 9 month contract faculty, but it's high time for projects. I normally have students who can work more hours, and that in turns means more time from me to keep things running.

This summer I have been working closely with the Kent Historical Society on a project to get their oral history collection online, over the past three years or so using interns from the Library Science program at KSU. We finally got the first batch up, after alot of work to capture and transfer digital files, make content descriptions and also work on transcriptions.

Here's the link to the collection at Ohio Memory:

http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16007coll83 

It's been amazing to work with the historical society- Alot of names that are familiar to me being a Kent native, and always a great perk of the job to deal with interesting content. One of the most entertaining recollections included in the project was from a local lawyer who had an office just down the hall from my father's, and it was incredible to hear the story of his early years. I think what is especially appealing to me about oral histories is the potential richness of the information and a little glimpse into someone's life and the experiences they have decided to highlight and share. We each have such winding paths, and it's not often that one gets an opportunity to talk in depth with someone about these stories. Oral histories are interesting in that they are recollections of events at a later time, and may hold imperfections that could be attributed in part to our flawed memories or embellished stories over time, but I find so interesting.

For this project, we started with taking an inventory of all the content. This was primarily content on compact discs, but we also had some audio cassettes and a lone VHS to think about capturing. We also met with the cataloger from Kent State's Special Collections and Archives (Kate Medicus), who has worked on the May 4 Oral History collection and have some recommendations for metadata capture. We then worked to create a list of our own local controlled vocabularies, mostly for the subject field. Since the project centered on the subject of Kent, our specific desired terms were likely not to be found in the Library of Congress subject headings.

My most recent intern looked at whether the transcription from automated services such as Happy Scribe were of use, or if the more manual approach to transcription would be preferable. There are a few reasons we wanted to include a text transcription for the audio files when possible. For one, there may be researchers that prefer the text format, and having an accurate full text account will also help with discoverability. One immediate issue was the presence of more regional, local names that are a bit unusual that we found to trip up automated services (street names like Depeyster is a good example here).

We will be adding more content to the collection in the coming weeks, and it's been exciting to finally see the project go live!

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