Four new oral history websites comprising more than 550 hours of content have been released by the Oral History Program at the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC). Three of these websites were built using open source resources that are available to other repositories seeking to provide online access to their own oral history collections.

OSU 150

The largest of these sites, The OSU Sesquicentennial Oral History Project, celebrates 150 years of OSU history by presenting 276 interviews conducted with OSU alumni, faculty, staff, current students and supporters. The project’s web portal is comprised of more than 400 hours of media and over 3.4 million words of transcription. About 1.8 TB of born-digital content were collected in building what is the largest oral history project ever conducted at Oregon State.

The vast majority of the interviews presented on the site were video recorded and all are contextualized with full-text transcripts, interview abstracts and biographical sketches. Users also have the option of sorting interviews by interviewee affiliation or interview theme, and are free to download .mp3 audio files of all interviews as well.

OHMS/Omeka Sites

In addition, three websites using a combination of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) and the Omeka web publishing platform are also now available. These websites are:

• Multicultural Voices of Oregon, which features interviews collected by the Oregon Multicultural Archives and the OSU Queer Archives, both programs within SCARC.
• Voices of Northwest Brewing, an outgrowth of the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives, also housed in SCARC.
• Voices of Oregon Agricultural College, a project that presents digitized audiocassettes and transcripts that were originally created in the late 1970s. These interviews were conducted with alumni and faculty associated with OAC, as Oregon State University was known prior to 1927.

All three of these websites utilize a combination of OHMS, the Omeka Seasons theme, the OHMSObject plug-in, and custom .css and .php modifications that have been released by the OSU Libraries on GitHub. Additional details on how the sites were created are provided in Technical Notes appended to each project.

For more information on any of these initiatives, please contact Chris Petersen, Senior Faculty Research Assistant in SCARC.