The SAA Web Archiving Section invites you to a virtual coffee chat with Doug Lambert of the University of Buffalo on Friday, April 26th at 12p EST. Doug will discuss Oral History Indexing (OHI) and it's relation to web archives, AI, and system interoperability. Registration link and information below:
The Web Archiving Section invites you to a Zoom meeting.
When: Apr 26, 2024 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://union.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctcu2qrz0oH9FlXi_uhYVhvG7sFDiVHILW
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Oral History Indexing by Doug Lambert: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00940798.2023.2235000
"Oral history indexing (OHI) is a set of practices that emerged in recent decades for digital content management and multimedia presentation of large audio/video (A/V) collections. Driven by the desire to publish complete interviews (and made possible by computer-based media), oral historians working with web developers introduced a variety of custom interfaces for A/V access centered around thematically defined passages within digital files. Akin to an indexed book, OHI systems allow cross-referencing to specific points within media documents, describe content through natural language, and promote users browsing and exploring across collections. Different than transcript-based models for mapping content, OHI focuses on access to A/V directly and dynamically through meaningful metadata elements like segments, summaries, and terms controlled and uncontrolled, all methodically structured at the timecode level. Since the 1990's, a range of approaches, methodologies and system attributes evolved led by a variety of libraries, museums, and other institutions. I inventoried some of these practices in 2023 in the Oral History Review and began to characterize a distinctive phase in OHI-a pre-AI era of software-enabled but fully human-performed indexing processes.
The 20+ year OHI enterprise as I defined it is arguably much more advanced than any sub-file level content management practices known in A/V web archiving, yet OHI sorely lacks metadata standardization or strategic system interoperability. In this talk, I will expand my 2023 inventory to characterize the fundamental elements of OHI across systems-a necessary baseline for future development. I will also talk about how the next generation of OHI will incorporate AI tools and I will invite a discussion on how the future of these practices can benefit from the involvement of experienced web archivists."