In this session, representatives from three Wisconsin repositories – small, medium and large – presented projects they created to preserve and present oral history materials from new and existing collections.
First, Josh Ranger, from University of Wisconsin-Osh Kosh, talked about the “Black Thursday Oral History Project,” a two-year effort to document a 1968 student protest at the university that resulted in 94 black students not only being expelled from Osh Kosh, but being banned from any other Wisconsin public university. A history professor and students were heavily involved in the project, which resulted in 122 interviews – 36 of which were from the students who had been expelled in 1968. After the interviews were collected, the project organizers used a software program called Audacity for signal processing to clean up the sound quality, and backups were made on three separate servers. Description was an ongoing process, as the collection was restricted until the publication of a book by the professor involved in the project. Since the project coincided with the 40th anniversary of the event, there was a significant outreach component, which was composed of three approaches: a public program one night in a music hall off campus, a multimedia exhibit at a campus gallery and a Web exhibit. All have been a success. The lessons learned:
- Get needs across to interviewers: format, segments, sound quality, introduction methods.
- You can be your own engineer – it’s not that complicated.
- Redundancy in file storage can be relatively cheap.
- If it’s done well, you’ll see 200 people in a music hall listening to oral histories.
Contact Ranger at ranger@uwosh.edu or see the exhibit at www.uwosh.edu/blackthursday.
Next were Allison Page and Leah Ujda of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From August 2007 to July 2009, they created the UWDCC-Forest Products Lab Oral History Project, to prepare for the centennial anniversary of the lab, which is the only such forest research facility in the nation. The project involved a great deal of pre-planning to gather stories of the research and people of the lab and its impact on the community, nation and world. Funding was provided by the lab. Much pre-planning was involved: developing questions to choosing narrators, etc. After the interviews were conducted, time-coded indices were created for the transcripts. The collection includes the digitally recorded audio, full-text transcripts, a metadata record in FMP and digital images of the narrators. The audio was processed through software called Levelator, then processed through cleaner software called Cleaner. The challenges were storing and preserving digital materials while providing conventional access, and access online. But the staff found solutions, including using University of Wisconsin server space. Finally, a Web site was created that included a finding aid, and a browse/full-text-search function. As of March, the site, which went live in July 2009, had received 9,000 hits. For information contact Page at allisonpage2008@gmail.com or Ujda at lujda@library.wisc.edu, or visit http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/index.shtml.
Finally, Sally Jacobs of the Wisconsin Historical Society, spoke of the “Oral Histories: Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust” project, which digitized materials that were collected during the 1970s and 1980s, including oral history interviews conducted between 1974-1981 of 22 Holocaust survivors and 2 American witnesses. Since the subject matter was so delicate, the digitization effort received the “Cadillac treatment,” Jacobs said. That included many meetings about terminology, interviews with potential researchers about what they would be looking for, redoing transcriptions that were incomplete, and focusing heavily on quality control, especially since the narrators on the original audiocassettes, when speaking of something very emotional, would either have much heavier accents from their native countries, or lapse into their native language. The tapes were converted to digital files through an in-house audio lab, which were then given a Web presence through an HTML interface instead of put into Dspace because the project organizers wanted to display text and audio segments at the same time. The final web site included photo galleries, full interviews, an excerpts section and a page for teachers. Jacobs would not recommend such treatment for all oral history collections, but ones as significant as this definitely deserve such focus. Visit the collection at www.wisconsinhistory.org/holocaustsurvivors.
