E-Views and Reviews: Oral History Gets Its Due

By Cheryl LaGuardia -- Library Journal, 6/1/2004

I've reviewed electronic products for LJ since 1992, when both e-resources and the art of reviewing them were still in training pants. When LJ proposed a different column that would step outside the basic review format and include views on the e-resource industry, I jumped at it.

This column will focus on the issues surrounding electronic resources: content, cost, provenance, stability, and character. My motivation remains to induce vendors to improve electronic research products and services. Pricing of e-resources—which is still largely shrouded in mystery—is an important issue. My first question when considering whether to review a product is, "How much?" Various factors impact pricing, and deals are made, but if producers can't give at least a ballpark range, the product won't be reviewed here. Without pricing information, it is impossible to give a fair assessment in the new electronic marketplace.

E-views and Reviews will also provide reviews of web-based resources, typically large electronic products that are multidisciplinary or groundbreaking. Often they'll be new, with some visits to renovated classics. LJ will review other subject-oriented electronic products in the Reference section of Reviews (see p. 180ff.).

QUOTE OF THE WEEK "We're not out to be the information Wal-Mart—we've listened to librarians' message that there's no 'one size fits all,' so we craft reference databases with the same care and creativity we lavish on books, each with a personality of its own. And we won't bludgeon the market into buying more than it wants or offer less than it needs. You can subscribe to a basic database and add or drop content modules as they're offered"—Linda May, VP of marketing, and Kevin Ohe, managing editor, print and electronic, Greenwood Publishing Group. We'll review Greenwood's Daily Life Online as soon as it's available (for a preview demo go to www.dailylife.greenwood.com).

E-CONTENT TO WATCH ARTstor, "a nonprofit initiative, founded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching, and learning in the arts and associated fields." We'll review it later this summer. For a sneak peek go to www.artstor.org.

THE NEXT BIG THING? Project TORCH (The Online Resource Center in the Humanities). Initially funded by the Mellon Foundation, it is under investigative development by Oxford University Press. The idea is to build a JSTOR-like product for monographic back file collections of university presses. What's so noteworthy about this? Well, besides the content, Phil Friedman has been named executive director. Folks in the library publishing industry respect Friedman—he's the right guy for the job. (For more see InfoTech , LJ 5/15/04, p. 23.)

Alexander Street Pr. alexanderstreet.com/products/orhi.htm

Oral History Online (OHO) is an index to oral histories in English that are available both on the web and in archives worldwide. Repositories range from Columbia University's Oral History Research Office to the Imperial War Museum in London. OHO launched in April with 7000 interviews and 850 collections. The file itself contains no full text, but in many cases it links to full-text interviews and audio and video files, collections that are both freely available on the web or fee-based. Most notably, interview-level bibliographic records are indexed for histories; there are over 15,000 of these records now available.

Collections include Black History Oral History/Black Women, a collection of oral histories detailing the experience of black women who attended Virginia Tech; Conversations with History 2003, interviews with men and women who have shaped modern history; the Family Farm Oral History Project, which focuses on the experience of the family farmer in Kentucky; Seminoles, the University of Florida's interviews with Seminole Indians; and Tejano Voices, which details the Latino experience in Texas. Alexander Street expects to have available by the end of the first year 300,000 interviews, 2300 collections, 600 video files, and 1600 audio files. The file is updated quarterly.

HOW DOES IT WORK? You can access the content via various methods. To get an idea of what's available, a quick glance through the Tables of Contents (TOC) may do the trick. TOCs are browsable for Repositories, Collections, Interviews, Interview Dates, Places, Historical Events, and All Subjects. But be warned that once you go into the TOCs you may not come out again for hours—they are enthralling. Here's a taste of what's listed (chronologically) in the TOC for Historical Events: Civil War 1861–1865; Sand Creek Massacre, 1864; Spanish-American War, 1898; Mexican Revolution, 1910– 1920; Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire, 1911; Holocaust, 1938–1945; Japanese American Internment, 1942–1945; Nuremberg Trials, 1945–1949; Martin Luther King's March on Washington, August 28, 1963; Kent State University Riot, May 4, 1970; and Kosovo War, 1998–1999.

Repositories represented include A Time of Visions, Abilene Christian University/Department of History; Camp Evans Infoage Science History Center; Gestalt Journal Press's Gestalt Therapy Page; Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago; and much more. The breadth and variety is considerable.

As I browsed through the Repositories TOC, I came upon the British Library Sound Archive, linked to it, and found an 1890 audio recording of Florence Nightingale. Then there's the Oklahoma Historical Society Research Library link, which leads to its Oral History archive in which I could reference records (and request copies) of interviews on topics ranging from Will Rogers to Wiley Post, from Wild West Shows to the Oklahoma City Bombing.

You'll eventually want to search the database. Interviews can be searched by 23 different criteria, including Keyword, Narrator, Age at Interview, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Gender, Occupation, Race, All Subjects, Years Discussed, Places Discussed, People Discussed, Historical Events Discussed, Organizations Discussed, Interviewer, Date of Interview, and more. You can sort results by collection, title, or interview year and limit it to include only records with full text, audio, and/or video. You can Find a Collection by searching for a word or phrase in all fields or by collection name. You can also search a range of dates for the year of a collection's creation, or search by city, country, or repository name. The folks who put this together understand how historians seek information.

For a more complex search, I entered "Japanese-American" in Keywords in Interview, "California" in Places Discussed, and "Internment" in Historical Events Discussed. This gave me 1,097 results (mentions in paragraphs of text), many of which came from the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive and which linked directly to the full text of interviews with Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II.

CAN YOU AND YOUR PATRONS USE IT? The information in this product is arranged beautifully. When it makes sense to list something chronologically, it is. When you wish there was an alternate means of looking for information, there is. Will librarians find it good? Yes. Will researchers find it so? A resounding yes.

HOW GOOD IS IT? Sorry to set the bar so high first column out, but this is a ten. Even the Help functions are fantastic. Alexander Street has included so much useful information, and made it so intelligently accessible, it's hard to imagine how the file can be made better…except by adding more content.

WHAT'S THE COST? Twelve-month access ranges from $250 for an American Oral History Association Member to $3990 for public libraries serving two million patrons or more. Academic and public library access is unlimited, and discounts are available through consortia or for multiple purchases. For detailed information, consult the web site.

THE BOTTOM LINE An essential resource for serious historical and cultural researchers, Oral History Online is unreservedly recommended for public and academic libraries, special collections, and archives/museums.