A Google for oral history recordings

It sounds like something you might find on the Starship Enterprise but the oral history metadata synchroniser (OHMS) could transform the way oral history collections are accessed worldwide.

OHMS is the brainchild of Doug Boyd (left), director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, who first began to think about broadening access to oral history interviews while he was an archivist at the University of Alabama. When he moved to Kentucky he got together with the head of the university’s digital programme and together they came up with OHMS.

The programme enables researchers to search through an oral history recording using keywords, and to be taken to the exact moment that the keyword is spoken. It means researchers do not have to scroll through hours of tape or pages of transcript before finding the topic they are interested in.

Boyd, who will be leading a workshop on OHMS at this year’s Oral History Society conference, says: “We have always talked a good game about oral history putting the stories on historical record but the reality was recordings sat on shelves and did not get used very often. We took the web usability approach and figured out a way to enhance access to oral history.”

Boyd says that OHMS has increased access to his archive of about 9000 interviews. The archive was lucky if 500 people visited it every year but since the OHMS was launched in 2008 around 8-10,000 people access interviews every month. “If you put the interviews out there people will use them,” says Boyd. ...