Capturing Memories: Oral History in the Digital Age

ORAL HISTORY EXPERIENCE WEEKEND .. Orange and Central West NSW

Posted June 17, 2013 in Latest News

      

Oral History Weekend  .. Orange and Central West NSW

Capturing Memories: Oral History in the Digital Age

Saturday 3 August 2013 from 9.30am – 4.30pm
        Introduction to Oral History theory and practice
Sunday 4th August 9.30am – 1pm
        Hands-on practice in interviewing and setting up an oral history project.

Venue: West Room, next door to Orange City Library, 147 Byng Street, Orange Costs: $95 includes lunch, morning and afternoon tea on Saturday, and refreshments on Sunday. Resources notes are included with the workshop fee.

Bookings essential. Call Jasmine Vidler Central West Libraries and Central West Writers’ Centre (CWWC) on 6393 8125 or Orange City Library on 6393 8132.  Email: JVidler@orange.nsw.gov.au   Fax 6393 8100

 
Come along to a practical workshop with Trish Levido, a member of the Oral History Association NSW training team.  Trish has many years’ experience leading workshops for local libraries, historical societies and other community groups.  She is passionate about oral history and had been an interviewer for the Mosman Library for more than 30 years.  Trish has many helpful tips to share with you.

Topics covered include:

• Introduction to oral history and the nature and reliability of memory
• Preparing and structuring an oral history interview
• Documentation: ethical issues, ownership and copyright
• Choosing and using a digital recorder
• Downloading recordings to a computer
• Editing using Audacity (free access editing software)
• Guidelines for preparing an interview summary, logging and transcription
• Saving sound files, burning to disc and transfer to other storage mediums
 
At the Sunday workshop you will be offered an opportunity for hands-on practice in conducting an oral history interview, learn more tips about the free software available for editing and transcribing interviews and ask questions about commencing an oral history project.

The event builds on the Oral History Association Oral History Handbook available for purchase at the workshop discounted to $25, normally $35. 

This project is supported by Arts NSW's Country Arts Support Program, a devolved funding program administered by Regional Arts NSW and Arts Outwest on behalf of the NSW Government.

Full details and registration form

RSL Living History Project - The Listening Post

The RSL Living History project is happy to announce that the first two decades (1920s and 1930s) of their official publication, the Listening Post, are now available for searching and downloading on the official website http://www.rslcentenary.org.au.

The PDFs were digitised from microfilm and are fully searchable. This is a major milestone for the project and will hopefully prove to be a valuable resource for researchers and history enthusiasts alike.

If you have the opportunity we would welcome your organisation to link to us either from your catalogue or any other relevant page on your website.

Ref: Museum 3 blog

At The Frontier 2011 - Digital Stories

The “digital frontier” is an important theme of At The Frontier 2011 conference and whilst the conference itself will focus on the why’s and where fore’s of the production of such material, it is important to showcase the end product, which is designed for the audience to see. What better way to do this than on a big public screen?

Anna Crane from Jäger Studio has curated a program of the vast range of digital material produced and presented by museums, galleries, interpretive centres, natural heritage, historic sites, digital artists and curators.

 

View here the daily program for Digital Stories:

Download PDF Digital Stories Daily Rundown

DIGITISATION AT THE STATE LIBRARY

Museums Australia NSW Tour and Talk
Wednesday 7 September 2011 4pm

Scott Wajon will lead a tour of the State Library's digitisation facilities and discuss the library's digitisation strategies, management of resources and technical questions. 

State Library of NSW
Macquarie Street, Sydney

http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/

Meeting point: Mitchell Library steps, opposite the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Get together after at the
Nippon Australia New Zealand Club
229 Macquarie St, Sydney

RSVP
The event is free, but bookings are essential and places are strictly limited.
Please send RSVPs by Monday 5 September to:

Paul Bentley
Executive Officer
Museums Australia (NSW)
Phone: 02 9387 7307
Mobile: 0416 121 347

pbentley@idx.com.au

Web: www.museumsaustralia.org.au/nsw

Regional museums in an online future

Getting it into the ether

We distributed draft information sheets on some of the essentials — developing web- sites with little money, social media, systems, standards and other topics. Ingrid Mason, from the Collections Australia Network, and Joy Suliman, from the Powerhouse Museum‘s ThinkSpace, led us through some of the fundamentals of creating sites and using social media. The branch will be using the sheets and suggestions at the conference, among other sources, in developing printed and online publications and as touchstones for future workshops.

To get a better understanding of online approaches by museums in New South Wales, we invited a few colleagues to talk to us about their experiences.

Maree Clutterbuck, Collections Manager, Sydney University Museums, outlined the development of a more integrated approach to managing cataloguing records in the 3 public museums and 50 smaller department museums at the oldest university in Australia (www.usyd.edu.au/museums/). The museums purchased KE EMu in 2006 to replace a number of separate systems. Cataloguing policy questions revolved around the fact that the museums primarily serve university staff and students rather than the general public. Opening access to some materials called for circumspection. These questions and data migration issues have now been resolved and the catalogue is expected to be available on the museums‘ website soon.

Geoff Barker has been working on a total asset management (TAM) project at the Powerhouse Museum (www.powerhouse museum.com). The museum has an international reputation for innovative use of technology. Its catalogue is a richly layered presentation of catalogue records and images of museum objects, comple- mented with links to user tags, related subjects, similar objects, auto-generated tags and sources such as Wikipedia, WorldCat records and the Library of Congress Authority File.

The TAM project is an externally funded project which is working on collections and objects whose current storage, age, and state of documentation is exposing them to risk. As well as addressing this primary objective, Geoff has been exploring options for improving the quality of data and enhancing the online experience. As better elements — significance state- ments, themes, images, tags and links — are generated, these are harvested automatically monthly from KE EMu database into the museum‘s server. This has significantly improved searching. It has also highlighted different practices of different depart- ments within the museum — such as the archive. This in turn may lead to breaking down some of the walls between them..

Other notable online strategies by the museum include use of Flickr to publish images and uploading content to other government projects—such as About New South Wales (about. nsw.gov.au/). Its Australian Dress Register (www.powerhouse museum.com/dressregister/) is expected to be launched as a public site this year. The museum's partner- ships on the Sydney Sidetracks web- site (www.abc.net.au/innovation/ sidetracks/) and the Dictionary of Sydney (www.dictionaryofsydney. org/) are indications of wider collaboration.

Read more . . .

Source: Museum Matters Vol 19 no 1 July 2010