As an example of a scholarly collection website, Reckonings developed “Curating Oral Histories” in Spring 2026, centering around a collection of interviews belonging to four different research projects. This site made use of Omeka S as the website platform.
In designing the web interface for these projects, Reckonings Co-PI Dr. Uta Poiger worked with course students to identify a number of central display features designed to make the oral histories both accessible and easy to explore. In the following section we explore each of these features by their utility and implementation.
1. Project Identity
As discussed above (see “Data Modeling Principles” above), one of our first efforts involves modeling the structure of a Project, to be used as an item that our Oral Histories can belong to.
In Omeka S terms, this involves creating a “Resource Template” called Project, that records basic information about a project that can be included whenever a viewer navigates to one of that project’s interviews.
This also allows us to group interviews together by their larger project in a variety of ways:
- A color-coded header is added to each interview page, allowing for an easy at-a-glance visual association with the project
- An information block about the larger project is automatically added to the page footer
- A “Part of project” link is added to the interview page, linking out to that project’s website
- The data structure lets us easily create a list view of all oral histories that are part of that project
2. Summary Block
The next data model is the Oral History item itself, which provides a list of fields that describe all of the data our team wished to include about each interview–things like the title, description, selected quotes, subject tags, etc. The “description” field is used as a Summary block, a short paragraph of text shown at the top of each of our interview pages, giving the curator a chance to offer a brief overview of the interview, giving readers an upfront context about the subjects or people involved.
In Omeka S website, we implement this data structure by way of another “Resource Template” called Oral History,with the fields above as the structure.
3. Interviewee (Biography Block), and
4. Interviewers/Curators (Biography Blocks)
As a final data structure our project defines a Person by a number of fields, allowing us to then associate a single person to potentially many different roles or interviews, while only needing to add them to our site once.
The data model we defined for our Oral History items offers three different places to choose any “Person” as a field value: the “Interviewee” field, where we can add the biographical information about the interviewee on an interview page, and the “Interviewer” and “Curator” fields, where similar information will be shown about the people in each of these roles.
In our Omeka S Oral History Resource Template, we associate this Person item as the value of each of those three fields, letting Omeka S keep track of the relationships between our Oral History and Person items, and letting our Omeka S theme automatically display the information about each of the tagged people when the interviews are displayed.
5. Selected Quotes
Similar to the Summary block, a “Selection from Interview” field gives site curators the chance to choose up a number of quotes that they feel best capture the tone or content of the interview. These quotes can then be displayed on the page above the interview content as an additional bit of upfront context, this time in the interviewee’s own words.
In Omeka S, we build this as a metadata field (Dublin Core “Abstract”, acting as an excerpt) that allows multiple values.
6. Time-coded Index
Long oral history interviews present a difficult navigation challenge for readers who want to find a specific topic or section of an interview. Offering users a time-coded index (essentially a table of contents including the time codes of each section) provides a quick and easy way to navigate through the interview with as much context as possible
As part of our usability goals, we developed a custom Omeka S theme that automatically processes these timecodes to create Javascript links between the timecode and the audio player component, letting readers click these codes to jump the playhead of the audio player directly to that section of the interview.
7. Multimedia Presentation Tools
While Omeka S excels at capturing items and metadata, its multimedia affordances are relatively simplistic and offer little in the way of customization or layout options. To improve upon this, our custom Omeka S theme adds a number of multimedia elements to the website which are included automatically when curators add the relevant types of media to their interview pages. These are:
- Transcript (PDF)
Perhaps the most important part of the interview content is the text transcription of the interview itself. As part of the process of creating our interviews, these transcripts are exported as PDF for use on the website.For the most reliable reading experience between desktop and mobile web browsers, our Omeka S theme automatically turns an interview’s PDF documents into an embedded PDF viewer. This includes usability features such as: paged views, zoom in/out, page rotation, download, and print options.
- Audio Player
For best reliability between browsers, our Omeka S theme turns an interview’s audio files into a native HTML audio player, allowing for basic controls including play/pause, playhead with seeking, volume controls, and download.
- YouTube Player
Handling video files is often one of the most challenging parts of a website’s multimedia content considerations. To avoid these issues, our team decided to support only videos that are available on YouTube, which then lets us display videos both with YouTube’s accessible video player interface, and without needing to host large files on our own website. Importantly, this works equally well for YouTube videos that are published as “unlisted,” offering a useful middle-ground between public and private content where a video can be available to the website but not directly discoverable through YouTube itself.Importantly, this does still require that any videos used in this project are suitable for upload to YouTube, both in terms of content and rights permitted by any owners or concerned parties.
8. Metadata
While many of the fields in our data model have specific single-purpose blocks on the web layout, we also provide a general block called “Metadata” that lets us collect all of the remaining metadata fields that we want to display as additional information about the interview.
In our Omeka S theme, we use this space to show:
- Subject
Subject tagging gives readers a way to browse across a collection by topic, allowing for easier exploration of related research materials. In our case, we show each “Subject” field in a list of “tags” presented as link buttons, where clicking any of the tags brings a reader to a page that shows all other interviews that have been tagged the same.
- Date
The date of the original interview
- Place
The location of the original interview
- Rights Holder
The owner of this interview content, if any
9. Full-text Transcript
While the above PDF transcript offers the best reading experience across devices, the PDF format itself can be limited in certain ways–for instance, not being easily searchable on the page, not being indexable across the website, and not easily highlighted for copying sections of the content.
To add those abilities back to this site, our Omeka S theme also includes a “Full-text transcript” block which shows the transcript again in a scrollable window, this time as plain text. Searching for text on this page will work as expected, and, similarly, Omeka S can easily index and search this field so that it returns as a result when a user searches for keywords that might appear in the interview transcript.
10. Associated Oral Histories
Where relevant, a curator can use this field to identify other interviews in this project that have similar content, allowing them to be listed here for readers to find if interested.
11. Links and Resources
Similar to the “Associated Oral Histories” field above, this field offers the curator a place to link to anything else on the web that they feel would be usefully related–perhaps other websites, projects, or related organizations.