Assignment X: A Linked Approach to Oral History / Weaving Stories from Stories

Mill Valley Public Library. (n.d.). After Hours. https://millvalleylibrary.org/890/After-Hours

“Libraries should keep stories, share stories, and make stories” (Stephens, 2019, p. 92). The Wholehearted Librarianship section “Telling Stories” shares this mission from Erik Boekesteijn, a self-described Pirate and Global Library Motivator, and delves into examples of what serving that mission looks like today. The Mill Valley Public Library’s ongoing The Naked Truth: Connect, Create, Contribute initiative as part of its After Hours Program is highlighted as an event welcoming library patrons into the making of stories. After Hours uses oral storytelling to surface “different narratives, ideas, and presentations that an audience might otherwise not consider or experience” (Mill Valley Public Library, n.d.). Patrons are given a voice about their experiences today, and communities can explore anecdotes as they pursue deeper human connections. As Stephens was told by Mill Valley librarian Anji Brenner, “Live storytelling is immediate and personal” (2019, p.93).

StoryCorps. (2024). StoryCorps Stories. https://storycorps.org/stories/

The non-profit organization StoryCorps has been making an even broader effort to gather, preserve, and share oral stories from diverse voices since 1993. It is “the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered” (StoryCorps, 2024), with nearly 700,000 voices captured. The collection is housed at the American Folklife Center at the U.S. Library of Congress, with the “born-digital” archive also available on the StoryCorps website. Stephens notes that “listeners can browse stories by location, collection, and year” (2019, p. 93). Organizations interested in creating a “sustainable community program around storytelling” are encouraged to use StoryCorps DIY kits to participate in making content by capturing their community’s stories for the collection as it continues to grow today.

Semantic Lab at Pratt. (2013). Linked Jazz. https://linkedjazz.org/

The Semantic Lab at Pratt’s Linked Jazz Project is another online source of recordings. Linked Jazz takes things to another level by using Linked Open Data to create a graph for visitors to explore the relationships. It offers API connections for interested parties to access the data. The project aims to reveal valuable connections in the professional and personal lives of jazz artists that can be found in archive documents; more specifically, the project takes a close look at what can be unearthed from within interviews. Rare, rich information exists within old jazz interview transcripts (Semantic Lab at Pratt, 2013). 

As a professional innovator with metadata, reading about these oral stories and the innovative ways to share rich details from within them drew an idea in my mind, which I would like to take this space to explore together. The idea relates to this advice from Think Like a Startup, “Don’t think about better vacuum cleaners, think about cleaner floors” (Mathews, 2012, p. 1). So, I will be bold here and get straight to the dream: It would be so cool if our communities were empowered to create and share their own digital collections with snippets sourced from many library collections around the globe. Before getting into the mechanics or reasons this would be a challenge, I want to allow this thought journey to play out. I thought the collections were extraordinary when learning about the projects highlighted here. However, access and connection still felt more limited than I wish they were – the different collections and innovations were disconnected even though they surely shared many qualities in common. The collection content also felt like a lot to sift through, with limited methods of filtering or using tags to get to a specific idea or collection of ideas within. 

Therefore, I was wondering, what if users could create and share their own connected graph of ideas, as we saw with the Linked Jazz Project, but of micro-segments from oral stories across digital collections, or at least within the vast StoryCorps archive? These linked ideas could build new meaning, connections, and perspectives upon the fantastic primary sources already collected. Through the use of temporal metadata, these mini-collection graphs could be rich with detail and navigable to niche ideas. The goal is not about changing the original meaning of anything anyone said but rather empowering the community to draw novel connections between similar things different people said in different circumstances–creating human experience collections that might otherwise be considered too niche. It could be a Long Tail exercise of the library helping people make sense of the world.

References

Let’s Talk Libraries. (2024). Episode 10 with Erik Boekesteijn. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-10-with-erik-boekesteijn/id1721817329?i=1000650465916 

Mathews, B. (2012). Think Like A Start Up. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/77d2cb98-ddab-4543-9e47-b011819231b3/content 

Mill Valley Public Library. (n.d.). After Hours. https://millvalleylibrary.org/890/After-Hours

Semantic Lab at Pratt. (2013). Linked Jazz. https://linkedjazz.org/

Stephens, M. (2019). Wholehearted Librarianship. ALA Editions. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/uez41fhbsvccfhzlbb7ki/StephensWholehearted.pdf?rlkey=zw2w06l51a1z7luvg7s7j3w8g&e=1&dl=0 

StoryCorps. (2024). About StoryCorps. https://storycorps.org/about/