Audio materials: As our graduate students investigated
materials at the Gore Research Center they discovered an excellent set
of oral histories that had been conducted with alumni from past
decades. From that extensive collection, twenty-five were selected
because of their relationship to the lead themes of our collection, such
as World War II, Civil Rights, etc. Our initial plan was to digitize and
display the typed transcript of each interview and then offer selected
audio excerpts as a supplement. When a new Director joined the Gore
Center he decided that the transcripts needed additional work to be
ready for online publication. We adapted by finding a work around to
offer only the selected audio excerpts. It consisted of loading MP3 files
to our server, but not within CONTENTdm, importing a photo of the
subject as the digital object for the CONTENTdm record, and then
creating a metadata field to include links to the MP3 files. The work of
selecting, reviewing and excerpting the oral histories was done by one
of our graduate student workers as an internship for course credit. She
selected and downloaded the freeware program, Audacity, to manage
the sound files and participated in designing the customized process
for creating the records. We hope to include the entire transcript of
each record at some point. At present our CONTENTdm records direct
users to the items available at our partner across campus.