http://avbarn.museum.state.il.us/
The following is an abstract for a presentation I'll give in April:
The Illinois State Museum's Audio-Video Barn contains over 300 hours of oral history interviews pertaining to agriculture in Illinois. The interviews range in date from new sessions recorded in 2007-2009, to archival sessions recorded between 1952 and 1993. The memories recorded in these interviews stretch from 2009 back to the 1880s. Other associated data, such as photographs and transcriptions, are also available in the A-V Barn.
The challenge was how to provide flexible navigation, filtering, and searching of these multimedia clips, while maintaining as much of the context and voice of the interviews as possible. Using the digital-indexing software "InterClipper," we cut each audio or video interview into short topic-based clips and indexed them using controlled-word vocabularies. This resulted in over 3500 clips of durations ranging from 30 seconds to 12 minutes, each indexed by topics. However, InterClipper cannot be served to the web, so after some review we decided to use the CMS software "Drupal" for our display framework. After editing the content in desktop applications such as MS Access, we migrated the data into MySQL and then developed a series of PHP scripts to transform the data in preparation for migration into the Drupal framework. Once the data were brought into Drupal, standard community-supported plug-in modules could be used to display, organize, search, and filter the interviews based on the subject indexes. Although the steps we took are particular to the data and goals of this project, the basic methods could be applied to any set of oral history sessions.
This project was funded by a two-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The A-V Barn site went online in late October, 2009.
I started from scratch on drupal last December after first building a prototype site of my own (my usual way of building sites) and then deciding that I would have to spend too much time writing things that were of less importance to the goals of the site. Drupal appealed to me because of the flexibility of creating content types, plus I knew of a couple of sites that I admired which had been built in drupal, including http://folkjam.org/
Sometimes it is much better to be lucky than skilled, and it was lucky for me that the migrate module was announced at the 2009 drupalcon http://drupal.org/project/migrate along with the associated table wizard project http://drupal.org/project/tw
These made it possible to migrate the oral history data from the archaic backend database into the custom content types I had created. Adding in faceted search, swftools, and gallery2 and I end up with an interface to a set of oral history interviews that I think may be unique. Thank you so much, all you drupal developers.