Oral Histories in Hydra: Use Cases

HT to Ben Armintor for taking notes.

Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) is tasked with doing *something* with Oral Histories

- there are already several Hydra partners working, so collecting use cases

[introductions]
Michelle, CHF: working with trained oral historians/subject specialists at CHF
Negotiating unusual rights issues around OH

KatLynch, Temple: OH was pilot data for first HyHead, just < 200 objects
Archiving PDF transcripts, clickthru agreements for access/use
Working on integrating into other Hydra digital collections, assembling a history from a series of objects
ME!
Gary, SUL: Lurking from HitB, looking for unique content types and presentation needs for the Box
Engelson, SUL: focusing on video, interested to see what is happening
Hannah, SUL: Problematic terms – oral histories implies audio – since much of this content is video, but also dealing with testimonial histories
Dealing with politically sensitive/human rights oral histories content
Evans, WaStL: Variety of projects, primiarily audio, using Avalon, always linking transcripts
Another challenge is diffusion of content sources across campus, many stakeholders, complicated rights scenarios for archive
Nadia, WaStL: Media archivist
Jon Dunn, IU: Avalon, many collections, largest in Center for Study of History & Memory, clear rights mean public platform from mass digitization project
Also a Yiddish project (A.H.E.Y.M.), also interest in OHMS; annotation & transcript alignment
Eben, BPL: Curious about modeling
Corey, NYU: Lurking in prospective svc of OH content at NYU
Ben Goldman: Especially interested in Hydra support of generating community archive
ELO, CUL: Yes.

Evans: Does annotation need to be held separate from transcription?

Michelle: How are OH needs distinct from Time based media?
- Workflow data specific to person/interviewee, Person records
- Both biographies of interviewee and descriptions of process of interview
KatLynch: Also has OH collections interwoven w/ other dig artifacts & also other interview(ee)s
Use of Personal Names as keywords, likewise place names
CHRPR: Are all persons catalogued by hand? Is this a good field for NER?
KatLynch: The backend identifies ontology entities
CHRPR: Collection specific?
KatLynch: There are local ontos and also a cross-cutting ontology
Michelle: Disambiguation of NE is a big deal
Linked names
CHRPR: Linked Jazz creator has moved to NYPL, similar work going on there to provide identification aided by semantic context of text. See: https://linkedjazz.org/tools/ecco/ http://ecco.nypl-labs.biz/
Michelle: Workflow issues- are you involved in the process or only in the final outputs
Jon: Only the final artifacts for us
Michelle: Doug Boyd's (OHMS) gives some capability for that kind of workflow description
Hannah:
Evans: We rarely have anything beyond a finding aid style description
KatLynch: We also do not have a separate workflow system
ContentDM, for example, allowed a user to add arbitrary data which allowed stopgap measure
Michelle: Can you talk about the clickthru agreement?
KatLynch: Needed to introduce the concerns of OH: transcript inaccuracy, lack of endorsement of content
Configurable on per-object level, persisted by session; would like to track as user consideration but works against open/unauthenticated context
Michelle: But that supports privacy concerns
KatLynch: Scope of collection can change this, too (time of collection and whether subjects ar alive, for example)
Evans: This changes constantly with program and university administration changes
Access context also changes subject's feelings about contribution
Michelle: OH understands publicity works against sincerity in interview
Bespoke grants "10 years after my wife dies"
Evans: We task student workers with follow up on this
KatLynch: Urgent projects often have unclear grant, so some of this work is in support of collection management that cannot be published
Jon: And these issues are not unique to OH, common to much ethnographic content
Hannah: If you make transcripts available, the media is more discoverable- but availability eroded visitor interest in the original media on discovery
Nadia: Film-makers ar somewhat different, b/c they want to license
Gary: This is probably task-dependent
KatLynch: Good coordination of transcript and playback are more successful, and allows synthesis of these approaches. Also, accessibility
CHRPR: In addition to coordinated transcripts, would be great to provide links to contextually related artifacts/resources
Michelle: this is under discussion under Beckman project, but no plans to build

Many: Where to go forward? Collect use cases on TBM IG in advance of work.
Michelle: Also, preservation concerns.
Hannah: Yes, relevant to the politically sensitive project. Access copies may be contingent on redaction-how to indicate in repository?
Michelle: One system?
Hannah: Yes, the FCR. Part of the same intellectual object, but characterized separately. We can share the modeling for this.
Jon: We use separate repositories for access and preservation artifacts.
KatLynch: <agrees>