Working Steps

Do you have an interview archive that you would like to make accessible with the help of Oral-History.Digital? Are you planning an interview project and would like to collaboratively evaluate your recordings? Do you want to preserve your audiovisual narrative research data in a sustainable way?

Archive/Collection

• You send the Oral-History.Digital team information about your interview archive via the Contact Form.
• You discuss your questions with the team during regular consultation hours or by email or phone.
• The team creates an area in the indexing environment for your archive, which you will manage.
• Technical configurations such as archive abbreviations, file paths or the link to your domain will be taken care of by the Oral-History.Digital team in consultation with you.
• You enter information about your institution, your archive and, if applicable, your individual collections. This information will be freely searchable in Oral-History.Digital.
• You decide which colours and logos are used to represent your archive.
• You decide which content and metadata of your interviews are put in, in which language they are, and whether they are displayed in list, grid and/or individual view.

Interviews

• You create new interview entries. You can do this by entering the metadata for each interview and interviewee individually, or by importing the metadata for multiple interviews and interviewees from a csv file that has been filled in according to the template. Other formats are beeing validated.
• Upload audio and video files (and video thumbnails) in the best possible quality to the FU Berlin media server, where they will be transcoded and made available for streaming in Oral-History.Digital.
• In the individual view of each interview, you can make corrections to all created or imported data and decide for each individual entry whether it should be visible to archive users.

Transcripts

• Transcripts are uploaded separately for each media file of an interview. A mass upload of transcripts is in preparation.
• Sentence-by-sentence timecodes are not required in the transcripts, but they are useful as they allow pinpoint searching, keywording and subtitling in Oral-History.Digital.
• If your transcripts do not yet have time codes, you can use the automatic alignment of the CLARIN Centre BAS at the LMU Munich. For this purpose, Oral-History.Digital currently offers a manual, in the future an interface.
• If you do not have transcripts, you can use the automatic speech recognition services of the BAS. Oral-History.Digital currently offers a manual for this, and an interface in the future.
• You can make corrections to individual interview segments in the transcript view of an interview.
• Translations of foreign language transcripts are handled and displayed in the same way.

Biographies, protocols and photos

• You can add short biographies and interview transcripts to each interview. You can also import them in bulk and revise them later.
•  Upload scanned photos and documents individually for each interview. You can also import them in bulk, one interview at a time, along with captions.

Table of contents and notes

• A table of contents with linked headings or summaries can be created for each interview if a time-coded transcript is available. An option to import existing tables of contents or summaries is planned.
• You can add editorial comments, explanations and references to individual interview segments in the transcript view of an interview.

Registry and map

• In an archive-specific index, you can create places of birth and interviews, people mentioned, group names or subject headings. You can import extensive indexes of places, people, organisations or topics with a csv file filled according to the template.
•  Not only complete interviews, but also individual interview segments can be linked to corresponding register entries, i.e. indexed.
• If your location register contains geo-coordinates, the interviews can be made searchable via biographical/interview-specific and/or archive-wide maps.

Discoverability

• Your interviews can be found in the cross-archive search of Oral-History.Digital with basic, possibly anonymised metadata (e.g. interview year, media type, abbreviated surname, etc.).
• For an optimised cross-archive search, your index entries need to be linked to normative data. Tools for this are in preparation.
• In the future, your interviews can also be listed in indexes such as the "Archivportal-D" and/or provided with a DOI.

User administration

• As the collection owner, you decide who can use which interviews from your archive. You can grant full reading access to your interviews to individual or all users of Oral-History.Digital.
• You decide for each interview, and if necessary for individual metadata, whether they are visible to these users.
• If you work in a team, you can assign specific roles and tasks to individual members, such as activating new user applications or indexing individual or all interviews.

Cooperation agreements and long-term archiving

• After a test phase, you agree with the Freie Universität Berlin on a longer-term use of Oral-History. Digital. A contract regulates the business, usage and data protection conditions as well as an appropriately staggered share of the costs. See "Documents" for details (in German).
• For long-term archiving, you can send your interviews via Oral-History.Digital to the CLARIN Centre BAS of the LMU Munich. You will need to sign a separate agreement for this. The BAS charges a one-off fee. See "Documents" (in German).

Ongoing interview project

• You can use Oral-History.Digital for one of your ongoing interview projects.
• After the first interview, you can upload it to the platform, make it accessible and evaluate it directly in a collaborative way.

Help and advice

• You can use the help wiki to guide you through each step (in German).
• Advice is given in a regular consultation hour or directly, by email or phone.
• The exchange with other interview archives represented in Oral-History-Digital is supported by occasional meetings and a mailing list.

Interested in the software?

• You don't have interviews but other audiovisual data that you want to make searchable?
• Or do you want to run the infrastructure locally?
• The Oral-History.Digital software is available as open source at https://github.com/oral-history-digital as a working prototype. We are looking forward to hearing from you.