Abstract:
In 2006-2007, Ball State University Libraries received a Library Services Technology Act (LSTA) grant to digitize 204 oral history interviews from Archives and Special Collections and create the Middletown Digital Oral History Collection. The collections chosen for digitization provide research material on populations that were neglected in the seminal studies conducted by sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd. Their publications, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929) and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflict (1937), used Muncie as “Middletown,” a representative American community and researchers have continued to return to study Muncie as “Middletown.” These neglected populations include African Americans, Jewish, Catholic and working class residents of Muncie, Indiana. Over the last thirty years, this lack of documentation on these groups has motivated historians to conduct oral histories with these communities.
The Middletown Digital Oral History Collection offers a model for using digital content management systems to provide access to oral history interviews that might otherwise be hidden to researchers, inaccessible due to distance, or lost due to the fragility of the recording medium. This has increased discovery and use of the oral history collections on the Ball State University campus and beyond, thereby bringing the voices of the Middletown to life.
In this presentation, we discussed the advantages of storing, organizing, and presenting a large digital oral history project in a digital content management system. Using the Middletown Digital Oral History Collection as a model, we’ll explain how such systems provide benefits to users and managers of these resources. By taking advantage of these features of digital content management systems, users and managers are able to organize and experience oral histories in a more sophisticated way.
