It has been a good week for the oral history project though the project has morphed into essentially a digitization effort for the semester. No trouble though, since I plan to keep working as a volunteer. There is still room for someone to work with me in the Spring for directed project credit.

I received the sample files digitized from the reels. They sound decent and match up to the print material in the 3-ring binders so I received permission to move forward and get all of the reels digitized which should be done in the next week. Of course digitization is only the first of a multi-step process. For these recordings to actually be useful I need to combine files because some single interviews span multiple tapes. I also need to clean up the noise and levels of the recordings. I think I can manage this in Audacity but it will take some time.

Also, now that I know the print material matches, it can be marked for digitization as well. I have not looked at every page but random sampling suggests that there are typewritten transcripts, deeds of gift and even some subject matter indexing for all of the reel interviews. I am going to ask my employer to donate conversion of this material because they use the absolute best OCR technology in the industry.

Of course I still have to catalog and classify so there is still some library work, but digitization had become the primary issue for the semester and rightly so given the people whose histories are contained in these recordings.

I spent the last two days at the Oral History Symposium in Oklahoma City which was fun. I met some nice people, got my copy of “Doing Oral History” signed by Donald Ritchie and saw overviews of several existing projects. I will post more in the future as I have the opportunity to look them over more fully but Murmur and Celebrate Oklahoma Voices are particularly interesting…I wish I had known about them during Dr. Martens’ Digital Collections course.

This is so much fun…what if I am an archivist?