Post-processing the MD Anderson Oral History Project: A multi-disciplinary approach to streamlining, efficiency and maximum content mapping

Abstract

The Making Cancer History Voices Oral History Project is run by the Research Medical Library at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. The project is unique among bio-and-medical institutions and archives because of its commitment to a three-part project mission: ongoing interview collection; extensive post-processing of interviews to map content; and the development of access tools for traditional and non-traditional users. The project began, however, with a narrowly conceived mission and fragmentary post-processing protocol. The authors describe the strategies adopted to implement a new mission, transforming the project into an efficient and integrated system with significant content mapping capacity. Implementation was significantly shaped by the multi-disciplinary nature of the oral history team: an oral historian and an archivist have collaborated to address the special challenges that spoken language presents to content management. They describe how they developed a meme-based coding system, developed search and navigation tools to facilitate use and staff workflow and organised a relational database.