Oral History Metadata Standards and Schemes « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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Oral History Metadata Standards and Schemes

(6 posts) (4 voices)

Asked 6 years ago by Erin Bell
Latest answer from Ethan Gruber
This question has a best answer.

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Erin Bell
Member
I'm wondering if anyone knows of an ideal metadata scheme for digital oral history projects and collections. I've seen many different approaches, most often DublinCore-based, but none seem to follow any identifiable standard specific to the oral history medium or field as a whole. In addition to the use of DublinCore et al, have there been any attempts to create or use something like PBCore (NPR/PBS multimedia metadata scheme http://pbcore.org/2.0/) that answers specifically to some of the unique characteristics of oral history media? Are there any agreed upon standards, exemplary use cases, important articles, etc.?

EDIT: I've created a public open Zotero Group that explores this issue as well. Join/Add if interested: https://www.zotero.org/groups/digital_oral_history_and_metadata
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Posted 6 years ago Permalink
Sheila Brennan
Member

Erin,
Have you looked at the Oral History Association's site? They have a number of resources: http://www.oralhistory.org/resources/

In Dublin Core, there is an oral history item type that offers specific metadata.

Posted 6 years ago Permalink
Bill Ferster
Member

Replying to @Erin Bell's post:

The Library of Congress' METS standard is worth looking into:

http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/

Posted 6 years ago Permalink
Ethan Gruber
Member

Depending on what metadata you actually want to record (and if you want to provide access to transcriptions), TEI is capable of encapsulating oral histories.

Posted 6 years ago Permalink
Erin Bell
Member

Replying to @Ethan Gruber's post:

Ethan, can you tell me more about this? Ideally, I would like to use TEI (or something similar) not only to mark up a transcription and/or a simplified minute-by-minute interview log, I would also like to connect certain moments to points in the audio file. Like something marked <question> would move to that moment. Make sense? Some desktop software does this but as far as I know not according to any standard. If you have some documentation about oral history and TEI, it would be really helpful.

Thanks!

Posted 6 years ago Permalink
Ethan Gruber
Member
Best Answer

The Faulkner audio collection consists of TEI files that are transcriptions of tapes of William Faulkner doing Q&A sessions back in the 1950s -> http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/

There are elements in TEI for recording timestamps of "events" in a dialog as well as speakers, and presumably questions.

Check the following for more information:

http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/ohonline.html
http://www.diglib.org/standards/level4oh.html
http://www.cdlib.org/groups/stwg/OH_BPG.html

Posted 6 years ago Permalink

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