The SAA Web Archiving Section invites you to a virtual coffee chat with Doug Lambert of the University at Buffalo on Friday, April 26th at 12:00pm Eastern. Doug will discuss Oral History Indexing (OHI) and it’s relation to web archives, AI, and system interoperability.
Description:
“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.”
Oral History Indexing by Doug Lambert: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00940798.2023.2235000
Registration:
Please register in advance for this meeting: https://union.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctcu2qrz0oH9FlXi_uhYVhvG7sFDiVHILW
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Web Archiving Section 