Creating Voices Online

Turning the tables on ourselves, here we explain the thinking behind the creation of this resource.

Q: What made you decide to develop Voices Online?

A: The starting point for Voices Online was the Museum's oral history archive, which currently contains over 4,000 hours of recorded interviews, hundreds of pages of interview summaries and thousands of pages of interview transcripts. The archive as a whole was and still is accessible to researchers who make an appointment with us. But in the past when doing projects such as exhibitions we have only been able to display short extracts. For example in a recent temporary exhibition, Grave Concerns: the disposal of London's dead, we included approximately two-and-a-half minutes of audio extracts from each of five interviews. The extracts provided intimate insights into a world with which many of us are not very familiar. However these five interviews in total actually comprise nearly ten hours of really fascinating detail about the lives of funeral directors, mortuary technicians and cemetery and crematorium managers. And we were only able to feature a fraction of this. With Voices Online we wanted to increase drastically the amount of oral history material that we made publicly available, including putting out full interviews. And we wanted to do so in a way that made the material easy to use, because there is a lot of information contained within just a single interview.

Q: With so much information contained within them, how do you deal with full interviews?

A: Each interview in the archive lasts between one and five hours and they are all recorded. For every interview we create a summary to help people to find their way around the content of the interview. And in some cases a transcript is also produced, which is a verbatim record of the interview. With Voices Online we wanted to 'mirror' this use of summaries and transcripts in providing access to life stories within the archive. Because each interview is so content rich, to begin with we decided to focus on 19 interviews. But of course we intend Voices Online to grow in the future once we have got some feedback on how useful people find the resource. The 19 interviews chosen feature people of different ages, backgrounds and experiences. To give a sense of the scale of the information involved, we calculate that between them these 19 interviews contain over 300,000 words.

Q: Why did you decide to make this project an online resource?

A: An online format seemed absolutely ideal for this project. Certainly it gave us the opportunity to display vast amounts of material. But key to it really is the hyperlink and what it offers in terms of linking different pieces of text as well as audio and images. For each interview we used hyperlinks to link each line of the summary with the related part of the transcript. The point of this is that it allows people to scroll through a summary and if they find an aspect of the interview in which they are particularly interested they can click on the relevant link to go directly to that part of the interview. This saves people (including ourselves of course) from having to skim through entire transcripts, something that can be incredibly time-consuming - some of them can be 50 or more pages in length. We also pulled out some extracts into a thematic presentation, which seemed a good way of helping people to find their way into the interviews that would most interest them. We were able to use hyperlinks to connect these extracts to the interviews in order to help people move directly into the interviews if they wanted to.

Q: Why did you decide to feature selected extracts as well as the full interviews?

With Voices Online we did not only want to make individual interviews easier to use. We also wanted to help people to look at a number of interviews side-by-side and so to draw out comparisons, connections and commonalities between them. This was for us part of promoting understanding of the real value of oral history as a historical source. We therefore decided to create a thematic presentation which brought together extracts from the 19 interviews in question. This thematic presentation is an interesting thing in its own right and in testing the resource we found that some people appreciated listening to or reading just these extracts. But other people wanted to find out more about one or several of the interviewees featured. And the thematic presentation acts as a route into the full interviews. People can move easily from any extract within the thematic presentation into the related full interview and so can delve deeper into the life stories of people that they find interesting. We also created links back from the interviews into the thematic presentation so that people can move smoothly from one interview via the themes. We included several extracts from each of the interviews in order to emphasise the richness and multiple meanings of any single life story, as well as to give people a chance to get to know the interviewees a little better.

Q: Why did you choose this particular thematic structure?

A: The structure of the thematic presentation is based upon the concept of every person being located at the centre of a series of social circles which spread out within their family, their communities, the city and the world. This seemed a really useful concept because it can be applied to all of the interviewees, which allows us to explore both similarities and differences in their experiences. We also hoped that, because the concept is equally relevant to the people using the resource, it would encourage them to see connections between their own lives and those of the interviewees and to view their own experiences as being part of the contemporary history of our city.

Q: Will Voices Online develop in the future?

A: We certainly do want Voices Online to develop in the future. We want to add more interviews, more audio, and more thematic presentations. But exactly how we do that depends upon the reactions that we receive to this phase one of the project. Because we are genuinely interested in what people thing, we have added a 'contact' link at the bottom of each page so that people can contact us to give us their views. But ultimately Voices Online will never be a finished product; instead we see it as an ongoing and evolving process to increase access to our oral history archive.