Home for the Holidays: Last of 2012

 

With my Christmas vacation officially starting on Monday with a six o’clock flight and layover to Appleton, Wisconsin, I stayed until six o’clock Friday performing the finishing touches on my William M’Neir case study. I spent the majority of the week playing catch up with HistoryMakers oral history processing, thus delaying my completion of his case study; after I left Chicago but before I started working in the Maryland State Archives, Executive Director Julieanna Richardson asked that the fellows dedicate one day a week to work on oral histories. Since M’Neir was a direct request from the state archivist Dr. Ed Papenfuse, it was prudent to give it my total attention.

Oral Histories

The HistoryMakers are testing a new, crowdsource friendly manner with which to process oral history interviews. After testing several different formats they settled on a SurveyMonkey report system; all of the fellows will essentially beta test this method and make recommendations based on our experiences. The previous format, typically called an “Evaluation” form, created a narrative interpretation of structural, administrative, and descriptive metadata for each interview. Each form is more-or-less broken down in three ways. (Warning: These terms are of my own invention and used here for clarity)

·         Frontmatter: The HistoryMaker’s name, the interview length, whether the interview is complete, is a follow-up, and when the previous interview was performed.

·         Tape Description: Every 30 minute segment is given a one page summary, 150 word abstract, a short narrative regarding its historical importance, and assigned Library of Congress Subject Headings; these headings compliment ones already assigned for the interview as a whole. Additionally, the interview’s and interviewer’s quality is described.

·         HistoryMaker biography: This information is taken from the entirety of the interview. These include jobs, organizations, schools, and family—pretty much anything intended for the EAC finding aid.

The form behaved as if it pre-dated the extensive databases maintained at THM headquarters in Chicago; it was time consuming to fill to completion, asked for redundant information, and the databases they were paired with were inaccessible remotely.

The new form is almost entirely descriptive metadata and renders the database access problem moot. The core of every evaluation is the Tape Description. Whereas the previous form asked for narrative qualitative analysis of the video, audio, and the quality of the interviewer, the SurveyMonkey form simply asks for a rating. Whereas the old form required a separate portion devoted to family background description, education, employment, and organizations, the new form abandons the family background description and only asks that the HistoryMaker biography references be noted for each tape rather than in a separate section. In the old method a lot of time is spent composing duplicate information as if the form were its own access point. This may have been true at one time or another but The HistoryMakers have since developed EAD, EAC-CPF finding aids, thorough databases, and a sophisticated work methodology that made these older forms duplicative and time consuming. 

The new form has its limits: Since data is inputted into fixed fields rather than free text, and the EAC information is noted per tape rather than per interview, there is less flexibility to accommodate HistoryMakers who mention more than four schools or five jobs in one tape. The only option is to create still more available fields. This however might look cumbersome or intimidating; it’s a balancing act.

Despite its flaws the new form is a significant improvement and recognizes the realities of the current HistoryMakers environment. During the summer Julieanna asked for our input on how we could increase productivity in oral history processing and I am gladdened to see that many of my and other’s suggestions are realized—albeit on the Web rather than a Word document.

DeLawrence Beard

Royce West

I completed evaluations for the Hons. Royce West and DeLawrence Beard. West is private lawyer and state senator from Texas but he lived in Annapolis as a boy. Beard moved to Maryland from St. Louis and, in 2003 when the interview was conducted, was a Circuit Court judge for Montgomery County. West was very entertaining and engaged with the camera; he frequently looked into the lens and addressed a hypothetical viewer. My favorite occasion of this was when West, recalling his time as a paperboy, chastised some folks who left town before settling their account; he looked directly at the camera and told them he was coming for them. Beard seemed more reserved at first; he had difficulty remembering particulars like names or even placing himself in the historical narrative. When asked about civil rights in St. Louis, he offered an interesting perspective. St. Louis, he claimed, did many things its own way. It desegregated Sportsman’s Park when Jackie Robinson refused to play otherwise, it desegregated its public transit workforce with little attention paid by its riders, and initiated its own school desegregation before Brown v. Board of Education. Once Beard warmed up, it was hard for him to stay still. The videographer frequently needed to reframe him as he settled differently in his chair.

2013

It is a bit unfortunate that I will be out of the archives until 2013 because I will have less time to prepare for a talk in February. Since the talk is at the Queen Anne’s Public Library in Stevensville, just beyond the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on Kent Island, I’m beginning with cases filed there. My colleague Tanner Sparks will talk about United States Colored Troops and I will talk about slave freedom petitions. Both represent institutionally valid methods that slaves used to earn their freedom in a system that favored the property class. Since the library wants to publish the event on their website by January 1^st and I will be out of state until then, I already proposed a title to Tanner: “Pistols and Petitions: Queen Anne's Slave Self Emancipation in the 19th Century.” Soldiers use rifles of course but the alliteration was too tempting.

Alex Champion--Maryland State Archives