OHMS Changes Everything: The Impact of OHMS on the Nunn Center

• In Event: Implementing OHMS: Multi-Institutional Perspectives

Abstract

The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries has utilized the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) for providing access to well over 1,000 interviews online. As a result, the Nunn Center has experienced a profound shift in priorities and resources away from transcription of interviews as the standard operating procedure for making oral history interviews accessible, toward OHMS Indexing of Nunn Center collections. The shift has yielded an empowering and affordable solution for enhancing access to our collections.

This large-scale implementation of OHMS - from indexing large collections to patron driven individual interviews - has had a major impact on shaping and reshaping the Nunn Center’s basic archival workflows, policies and procedures, as well as re-evaluating OHMS as an index management workflow tool. This paper examines the impact of the Nunn Center’s aggressive OHMS implementation over the past few years from the perspectives of archival collection management, digitization, transcription and indexing, reference, prioritization, and quality control. Additionally, the paper introduces a more effective, automated workflow management method and GUI interface allowing managers to monitor, and encourage, multiple indexing workflow streams. Finally, this paper reflects on the role of OHMS in interview-level archival processing in the context of the current archival trends of relating to the guiding principals of MPLP (More Product, Less Process) and how they relate to oral history archival processing. The result of has yielded an empowering and affordable solution for enhancing access to our collections.

Author

• Kopana Terry, University of Kentucky Libraries