The HistoryMakers

From the beginning, Julieanna Richardson envisioned The HistoryMakers as an organization that could successfully combine state of the art technology with traditional oral history methodology.  Her dream has come true in the form of a unique test digital archive.  With a donation of research-based technology from Carnegie Mellon University’s Informedia Digital Video Library, the dedicated team headed by Professor Wactlar and funded by a $163,800 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS), The HistoryMakers has created a test digital archive of 400 interviews (1200 hours of searchable video).  This digital archive is now being tested at the following institutions:
ADD POWERPOINT PRESENTATION
Click here for more information about The HistoryMakers.

Informedia Digital Video Library
Informedia Digital Video Library, started in 1994, is a research project at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. The overarching goal of Informedia initiatives is to achieve machine understanding of video and film media, including all aspects of search, retrieval, visualization and summarization in both contemporaneous and archival content collections. The base technology developed under Informedia-I combines speech, image and natural language understanding to automatically transcribe, segment and index linear video for intelligent search and image retrieval. Informedia-II seeks to improve the dynamic extraction, summarization, visualization, and presentation of distributed video, automatically producing “collages” and “auto-documentaries” that summarize documents from text, images, audio and video into one single abstraction. Informedia technologies are being applied in the areas of education, health care, defense intelligence and the coordination and understanding of human activity.  See the website here:Informedia Digital Video Library

Process Description

Digitization & Encoding
The HistoryMakers interviews are recorded on Sony Betacam SP videocassettes, an analog format for professional video recording. Each analog 30-minute Beta SP videotape from the 400 selected interviews was digitized and encoded as a separate MPEG-1 video file which was saved on The HistoryMakers file server. Video technicians checked problems reported by cataloguers and made necessary adjustments (i.e., audio boosting, color correction or re-encoding). All files were transferred to Informedia Digital Video Library where their staff viewed the video files while working with The HistoryMakers staff to optimize quality.

Transcription
Transcription of the 400 interviews was outsourced to several transcription firms and individuals, according to standards outlined in The HistoryMakers Transcribers’ Manual.  These were based on the Minnesota Historical Society's standards for oral history transcription.  A text file was created to correspond with each 30 minutes of encoded and digitized video footage.

Editing Transcripts
The 400 transcripts were proofread by volunteer proofreaders prior to processing and cataloguing.  This allowed cataloguers more time to concentrate on their work. Proofreading included auditing (listening to the interview and editing to make sure that the text matched the spoken words); checking and correcting spellings including names; editing the text to conform to style standards; and adding other key information to allow for contextual search of the interview. Additional information was set off by brackets to distinguish it from the spoken words. These references were used for name completion (“Martin [Luther King, Jr.]”) locations (“Savannah [Georgia]”) and spelling of acronyms (“NCNW [National Council of Negro Women]”).

Cataloguing with Informedia's Segmentor
Informedia Digital Video Library’s 'Segmentor' application is used to do manual editing and annotation of the videos. The digital video file and its corresponding transcript text file were opened with the Segmentor application. Metadata for the files were added, and the video and text were divided into segments with their own annotation. The metadata was saved as XML files maintaining the hierarchy of tape and segments

Segmenting The interviews were divided at natural boundaries to create thematic video segments, for the dual purpose of defining annotation intervals and for their subsequent function as retrieval units. Within each tape-level “project”, cataloguers used the Segmentor’s video editing controls to set “In” and “out” points for each segment, averaging four to six minutes. The section of transcript corresponding to that portion of video was inserted in the Segment Transcript Window, and the segment was assigned a title that would quickly give the user an idea of what was contained in that segment. The segment transcript, title and codes defining segment boundaries were saved under the “project” metadata in one XML file.

Indexing
The individual segments, averaging 4-6 minutes, were indexed by dates, topics and locations using Library of Congress Subject Headings and Lorene Byron Brown’s Subject Headings for African American Materials.  The HistoryMakers also found it necessary to create its own local index terms to include “conceptual” along with “key word” searching.