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August 2005, CHOICE


ORAL HISTORY ONLINE

Oral History Online offers indexed searching of oral history collections available on the Web and provides bibliographic records for oral history collections in English at academic and historical repositories around the world and in select private collections.  Oral History Online, which debuted in spring 2004 and is updated quarterly, currently indexes 75,000 full-text transcriptions, 500 audio and video files, and contains 7,900 bibliographic records.  By year’s end, the publisher projects those numbers will quadruple.  Several features recommend using Oral History Online instead of Web search engines (e.g., Google).  Oral History Online indexes only oral history collections and interviews and allows both free text and controlled vocabulary searching.  Oral History Online provides three basic ways to access collections and interviews.  Table of Contents provides alphabetically arranged, hyperlinked lists of repositories and collections, as well as indexes to subject headings, geographic locations, and an expanding list of historical events ranging in date from the American Civil War to September 11th.  Find Collections provides eight options for searching collection description, and Search Interviews allows users to locate specific documents using over 20 fields.  Subscription fees are based on school enrollments and public library populations and range from $350 to $3,990.  Consortia discounts are available to academic institutions.  The publisher offers two useful free resources: a directory of oral history repositories around the world, and a list of the top 100 oral history collections accessed through Oral History Online.  Oral History Online full functionality is available with 4.0 or higher versions of Navigator and Explorer, but will work with earlier versions.  A resource well worth its reasonable price.  

Summing up: Recommended. General and academic collections. Reviewer: L. K. Speer, Southeast Missouri University

  © Copyright 2003 Alexander Street Press. All rights reserved.                 Last Updated: 12-Aug-2008