As I will be attending Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (September 22-26, Valetta, Malta) to present two posters, I was keen to attend the workshop on Supporting Users Exploration of Digital Libraries (short, SUEDL2013) as well. We (i.e. yours truly, Franciska de Jong, Stef Scagliola and Roeland Ordelman) submitted a demo paper titled Research Environment for Exploring Oral History Collections. In this paper we describe the fundamental principles underlying the Oral History Today interface, which we are developing to improve exploration in oral history collections.
To support scholars in their use of oral history collections, we draw upon the previous work of De Jong, Ordelman and Scagliola [1] to describe four stages of scholarly research and user requirements related to each stage. These stages are:
- Exploration and selection
This stage focuses on searching for material related to the research of the scholar, in which the scholar wants to acquire an idea of what material is available. - Exploration and investigation
This stage focuses on selecting and analysing material, in which the scholar wants to view audiovisual material and annotate the material with his or her analyses. - Result presentation
This stage focuses on presentation of research results, in which the scholar wants to share data (e.g. fragments from interviews) and aforementioned annotations with peers. - Data curation
This last stage focuses on preserving research output (the data and annotations) for future research and enabling reuse.
As the Oral History Today project focuses on exploration, the first two stages are at the core, while basic functionality for the latter stages is also researched and developed. The paper describes several functionalities developed based on these research stages.
I’m looking forward to presenting the demo at SUEDL2013 and acquiring more responses to the interface. When the paper is published, I’ll provide the links on the publications page.
[1] De Jong, F., Ordelman, R., & Scagliola, S. (2011). Audio-visual Collections and the User Needs of Scholars in the Humanities: a Case for Co-Development. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Supporting Digital Humanities (SDH 2011), Copenhagen, Denmark, 2011. Centre for Language Technology, Copenhagen. 