ADST Oral History Project

Taking it to the next level for users and researchers

Oral History Project

A primary source of first-hand historical accounts A rich, detailed, objective database in its

aggregation An untapped treasure trove for researchers A handy tool for FSO’s at post and in bureaus

How do we tap it, how do we make the treasure available to the average user or

researcher?

Make it searchable using multiple search key words Google search box already exists

Table of contents already exists

List of key words for each submission already exists

But it is not exactly user friendly because the present search box lacks the power to cut across individual histories and extract coincidences, mutualities, chance collaborations that made a difference at post and in history.

Also, the search results take us to a whole report, not the piece we need.

Let’s start with a search for my first overseas posting, Guinea-Bissau:

63 results….not too shabby for a tiny post that seldom had more than 10 Americans at one time.

Let’s try a more detailed search. Let’s try: Guinea-Bissau, independence, elections: 59 hits, mostly the same hits as before.

These results are scalable to larger and perhaps more important posts, more results, but few Iinterlinkages.

But what if we had key words and elements in a spreadsheet? Better yet, in a database?

The database elements already exist in individual submissions:

Guinea-Bissau

1974, 1975, 1976, 1977

Portugal USUN London

Each oral history has keywords listed at the beginning of each submission. Somebody was thinking about the future.

Creating an Access database would be the first step in making this priceless data source minable by researchers and average users.

But it would only be a start.

And it wouldn’t come without a cost.

Interns could be trained in Access to do the tedious data entry based on the table of contents listing that we already have.

But you would need knowledgeable people, perhaps retirees to comb through the lists of each submission and decide on a controlled but natural vocabulary of searcheable keywords.

It could also be farmed out to students, to read a submission and produce tags - a sort of crowd-sourced folksonomy. A resume stuffer if coordinated through similar programs being conducted by eDiplomacy.

Either way, it would only be a start.

Metadata is the answer!

The present Google search box only takes you to a whole submission. Then you have to read through the whole piece to find the pertinent stuff.

A better search system involving internal tags would direct the researcher to the section or the paragraph of the entire submission that contained the information required.

For example, Let’s type in the box “Succession in Egypt,” a search I actually performed when I was acting mgmt counselor in Cairo in 2006.

278 results. The first one is always interesting. Maybe we will get lucky!

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs ...File Format: PDF/Adobe AcrobatSuccession issue ... Afterwards, he was sent to open a clinic in Luxor in upper Egypt. ... When she married my father, she was 25, and they went to Egypt that.www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/McClanahan,%20Grant%20V.toc.pdf

Ugh! The whole report!

But we see that he was there 1946-1954, and we know what happened 1952-1954, succession from King Farouk to the free Officer’s Movement to Naguib to Nasser! Bull’s eye. Almost. We only have one account. We still need context.

Application of subject tags to each subsection, each paragraph, would assist the researcher by enabling him/her to directly find the information needed, based on a key word search, and across multiple records:

The Ambassador’s perspective

The DCM’s perspective

The political officer’s perspective

The Admin officer’s perspective

The Ambo’s secretary’s perspective

The desk officer’s perspective

The assistant secretary’s perspective

The consular officer’s perspective

That’s probably enough for today.

This would be a lengthy project

It may involve some costs, though I would imagine grant funding organizations would leap at the chance to be involved with such a project, especially in the museum, archives, and library world.

It would require constant maintenance, even more so because it would make oral histories much more useful and hence much more popular (more submissions, more views of ad space, more usage).

Questions?