The Hockey Museum is delighted to announce the completion of a project to develop and improve access to its archive of diverse oral history interviews. New digital tools have been created to enhance the Museum’s existing interviews, which are showcased online through our website.
Oral Histories – The Hockey Museum
What is oral history?
Oral history is the collection and study of audio or video recordings of interviews with people who have personal knowledge of past events. In The Hockey Museum’s case, our programme of oral interviewing captures the lived experiences of hockey’s stars and innovators, its players, coaches, administrators and officials. Oral history can be a powerful reminiscence tool that preserves these individuals’ lives in hockey and, importantly, their voices and words for posterity. These recordings may be intangible, but they are invaluable for capturing the history of hockey as told by those who have lived through and impacted it.
What has the project achieved and how?
The Hockey Museum has worked with Space Galleon Digital Media and mr.creative studio to develop a new webpage with innovative functionality that showcases our oral history interviews in a more user-friendly and accessible way.
All our recorded interviews are now word-searchable individually and collectively, allowing the user to identify and engage with fascinating narrative themes across the entire oral history collection.
For the first time, we have situated all oral history interviews within a single webpage, which ends unnecessary back and forth navigation, a known digital access barrier, and greatly improves the user experience.
Additional information and imagery have also been made visible within the one webpage to better contextualise each interview. Interview date, keywords and themes, interviewee images and short biographies all combine to aid understanding of our interviews’ content and facilitate seamless navigation between our many oral histories.
Screenshot of the oral histories webpage with its new introduction and enhanced functionality.
This work has built upon our established process of innovatively indexing interviews to highlight their content. The indexing process utilises a pioneering software developed by the University of Kentucky called the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS). Using OHMS, we break down each interview into time-stamped thematic chapters with keywords, subjects and partial transcripts. This allows the user to more easily comprehend the full content of each interview. Moreover, the audio becomes word searchable, allowing the user to either listen to the whole interview or search within it for themes, events or people that they are particularly interested in – but, significantly, only within one interview at a time and only with limited contextual information visible.
For several years prior to this latest project, The Hockey Museum has successfully incorporated the OHMS software into our website, but we always felt we could improve its functionality given the opportunity. This project has realised that ambition by improving digital access to our oral history collection and refining the overall user experience.
Shane Smith, The Hockey Museum’s Curator, said:
“This project further delivers on The Hockey Museum’s strategic objective of digital innovation by removing barriers to culture and facilitating improved public access to hockey history and to our unique, diverse collection. The realisation of this project, which opens up or oral history interviews in fresh and exciting ways, is a great example of The Hockey Museum’s commitment to delivering against our inclusive Vision.”
Can you help?
We need indexers.
The Hockey Museum has recorded 60+ oral history interviews in audio or video format, but only half of these have been indexed and made available on our website. We are seeking volunteers to help us index the remainder so that they can be presented online. We want to be able to showcase our entire oral history collection but, being a small, independent charity museum, we need voluntary help to achieve this goal.
- A reasonable degree of computer literacy is essential.
- Knowledge of hockey is advantageous but not compulsory.
- Indexing work is completed through an online platform and can be undertaken remotely.
- Training and on-going support will be provided.
To register your interest in volunteering with our oral history programme, please contact us through our website form: Contact Us – The Hockey Museum
How was the project funded?
The Hockey Museum trustees are grateful to the people and organisations whose financial support has facilitated the delivery of this exciting project.
- The Chapman Charitable Trust – a family Trust settled by Mrs Marjorie Chapman that supports efforts to increase accessibility in the arts.
- Contributors to the David Prosser media fund – a restricted fund of annual donations made to The Hockey Museum in memory of the former Wales and Great Britain (GB) captain David Prosser by his GB teammates from the 1966 Australia tour. David’s career away from hockey was the inspiration behind this support. It facilitates a small but reliable income that The Hockey Museum draws on to progress film and digital media projects.
- The Friends of The Hockey Museum – regular donors who collectively support our operational and project costs and whose reliable annual contributions we could not do without. Why not join them and help us achieve even more? How to Support Us? – The Hockey Museum
Screenshot of the oral histories webpage. Its enhanced functionality and additional biographical information facilitate discovery and improve the user experience.
