Supporting access to large digital oral history archives

Abstract

This paper describes our experience with the creation, indexing, and provision of access to a very large archive of videotaped oral histories - 116,000 hours of digitized interviews in 32 languages from 52,000 survivors, liberations, rescuers, and witnesses of the Nazi Holocaust. It goes on to identify a set of critical research issues that must be addressed if we are to provide full and detailed access to collections of this size: issues in user requirement studies, automatic speech recognition, automatic classification, segmentation, summarization, retrieval, and user interfaces. The paper ends by inviting others to discuss use of these materials in their own research.