Building Oral History Projects: CollectionBuilder and Oral History as Data

We recently hosted a CollectionBuilder Monthly Meetup focused on building oral history projects using CollectionBuilder. During the meetup, many helpful strategies, resources, and examples were shared related to integrating oral histories into CollectionBuilder projects.

This blog post highlights these resources, methods, and project examples to help guide you as you begin or continue work on oral history collections.

Oral History as Data

Oral History as Data (OHD) is a static web framework that allows users to analyze and publish coded oral history or qualitative interview transcripts on the web. The OHD project is closely related to the CollectionBuilder project, and the current iteration was built on top of a CollectionBuilder-GH template.

OHD was first built in 2018 originating from work at the University of Idaho Library’s Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CD?L). This framework has served as the foundation for several digital humanities projects at the University of Idaho. To use OHD for your own site, you can copy the OHD Template and use the OHD Lesson Template Documentation.

OHD Project Examples:

• OHD Demo Site
• The Long 1960s
• Voices of Gay Rodeo
• CTRL+Shift

Oral History Projects Using CollectionBuilder

You can incorporate transcripts for oral history video or audio files as markdown or .txt files within your CollectionBuilder metadata spreadsheet in the object_transcript field. Learn more about the object_transcript field in our Metadata Documentation for CollectionBuilder-CSV. In addition, you can view an example of a video item featuring a transcript.

CB Oral History Project Examples:

• Tacoma Japanese Language School Oral History Collection (University of Washington Tacoma)
• Idaho Queered (University of Idaho)
• See more Oral History Projects in the CollectionBuilder Examples Site

Connect with Us

If you have questions about how to start a new oral history project or continue an ongoing oral history project with CollectionBuilder, you can:

• Email the CollectionBuilder team at collectionbuilder.team@gmail.com
• Post in the CollectionBuilder GitHub Discussion Board
• Join the CollectionBuilder Slack’s #oral-histories channel (Sign up for Slack)