From Southern Oral History Program Acting Director David Cline …
The Southern Oral History Program and the Long Civil Rights Movement project were well represented at the Oral History Association conference in Louisville, Kentucky last week, October 14-18. Acting Director David Cline attended sessions, met with potential collaborators, and conducted six new interviews about Louisville’s busing history; Outreach Coordinator Beth Millwood presided over a session devoted to Institutional Review Boards; former Associate Director Kerry Taylor presented work on his oral histories of the Obama campaign and black political networks in South Carolina; and former LCRM student research assistants Jennifer Dixon and Rachel Martin presented on their research about Charleston’s 1969 hospital
workers’ strike and school desegregation in Tennessee, respectively. All told, it was a fine showing for the Long Civil Rights Movement project!
Seth Kotch, the digital coordinator at the Southern Oral History Program, recently led a seminar for scholars and students of oral history and literature at the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
Seth discussed the challenges of digitization and some of the possibilities and pitfalls presented by new modes of publishing, including some of those being investigated by the Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement project. Read a bit more here …
The Southern Oral History Program was featured in the July issue of Our State magazine. Take a look …
The Southern Historical Collection together with UNC Libraries is pleased to present the new SOHP digital collection:
http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/sohp/
Our new site allows more and better access to our interviews. It provides users with even greater search capabilities and functionality. Most importantly, the CONTENTdm platform has the ability to deliver digital content on the Web. In addition to the 500+ interviews already delivered digitally by Oral Histories of the American South, users can now access another 330 digital transcripts as well as around 290 digital audio interviews from the new CONTENTdm site. These numbers will only continue to grow!
The new site includes a number of browse pages (Interviewee, Interviewer, Project, Occupation, Subject, and Ethnicity), as well as the old site’s keyword searches (though users can now search across transcript and abstract fields as well!) A powerful advanced search is available from the main Libraries digital collections search page (http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm4/search.php). The advanced search includes the ability to search interviews by multiple Boolean operators (and, or, not) in specified fields, search by date ranges plus keyword in specific fields, and a search of multiple keywords based on their proximity to each other within a field.
Check out the new site–we hope you enjoy it!