As part of the Reckonings Community Network Series, the Reckonings Project has hosted two workshops this summer and published a toolkit on Curating Community Voices. The aim of these offerings is to help participants conceptualize new interview projects and to present effective approaches to rendering interviews in a digital format. The workshops emphasize the significance of oral histories and their capacity to preserve community voices and histories.

Participants looked at ways of presenting oral history features such as transcripts, audio and video files, time-coded indexes, and biographical information about interview participants. These features are designed to make the long-form content of oral history interviews more accessible and navigable to readers and researchers.

The toolkit, written by Assistant Director of Design & Program Manager, Greg Lord, also helps new and ongoing projects imagine how best to structure the data and content of their own collections for presentation on the web. Like all our work and toolkits, this one has grown from collaborations between community partners, students, staff, and faculty.

Take a look at the sandbox website and an example of an oral history from the West End Museum. Both use the Omeka S Resource Template that the toolkit describes.

In collaboration with Patrice Green from the Schlesinger Library, Dzidzor Azaglo and Uta Poiger will be hosting an Archives Fellowship Hour on November 9th from 6:00 to 8:00pm in the Bruce Bolling Building on how to record and preserve family and community stories and rituals.

You can register for this event at this link.