Samuel Proctor Oral History Archives

Overview:

The Samuel Proctor Oral History Archives is affiliated with the University of Florida’s History program. They have 4,000 interviews and 85,000 transcribed pages dating from 1953-2006. It is the largest oral history collection in the South. It contains major collections of interviews with Native Americans, African Americans, women, pioneers, and citrus industry workers of Florida.

Collection Principles:

The collection was digitized in conjunction with the history department whose holdings determined what oral histories were transcribed and included in the archive.

The collection may be browsed by date, county, or topic. It is full text searchable with a powerful search engine. There is an advanced search page that allows searching within specific collections and/or within specific portions of the individual record. There are tips for Boolean searching.

Object Characteristics:

Each typed transcript is OCR’d and can be viewed either as a scan of the transcript or a full-text typed page. The scans are viewed as JPGs. Both scans and full-text pages utilize Microsoft Active Server Pages. Page images sometimes include visible editing marks but can not be enlarged. Each document can be navigated by jumping to the first, last, next, or previous page. There is also a drop down menu to jump to a specific page.

Metadata:

You can download the entire 350 page catalog of the oral collection. Each interview is listed in alpha order with unique project number and page number. There are also indexes by project.

Within the digital collection, each resource has a table of contents and a full citation with bibliographic ID, volume ID, title, publication date, source institution, holding location, and attribution statement.

Audience:

As described on the site in the about section, the transcribed interviews are used by:

-research scholars

-students

-journalists

-genealogists

-other interested groups

Researchers have used the oral history material for theses, dissertations, articles, and books.

Conclusion:

This collection is well-organized and usable overall but I wonder why they haven’t included the audio files from which all the transcripts came. I couldn’t find any information about the decision but it would really enrich the content and make it more interesting.