Beyond oral history: Using the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer to enhance access to audiovisual collections

Abstract

The Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) is an open source system designed to transform access to oral history recordings by presenting digital audio or video in conjunction with a transcript and/or index and by connecting users to a particular moment in an interview via browsing or keyword searching. The OHMS system was initially designed to be used with oral history recordings, but can also be used with any digital audio or video files. The first part of this paper will introduce readers to OHMS and give an overview of the important features of the OHMS system. The second part uses a case study of OHMS at the University of Georgia to discuss the challenges of providing access to archival home movie collections and the differences between collections management and content description. The third part presents a case study from Duke University to describe two methods for bypassing the sometimes unwieldy workflow of the OHMS application — Mail Merge and Open Refine — to create description that can be crosswalked into OHMS XML.