By Shaun Banther
The Golden Library staff has made several changes to accelerate the digitization of its Oral History Project in a continued effort to preserve the spoken history of Portales, N.M.
The Oral History Project began in the early 1970s with the goal of interviewing Portales residents and obtaining a recorded oral history of the town’s beginnings, according to Richard Baysinger, media services librarian.
Baysinger said the interviews include information from the women’s rights movement, prohibition in the area, Native American tribes, local politics, and Eastern New Mexico University’s establishment.
“For the first 165 of the interviews, we did the digitization,” Baysinger said. “I had several students that helped me with it. The problem is 400 plus interviews in this collection alone take an awful lot of manpower.”
The library has hired digital archivist Tom Fine to continue digitization of the oral histories, Baysinger said.
“We have contracted with BiblioBoard, which is an EBSCO product,” Baysinger said. “We can put our collection in a database, which will give a greater access to these interviews, providing more access and exposure for researchers.”
The interviews will be available through the database in a converted MP3 format for streaming or download.
The library will have no limits on upload space and will be charged based on full-time enrollment hours for the university.
The library staff are “in the process of looking for a transcription service,” according to Baysinger. However, the library’s special collections team have hired students to do the transcribing for the interviews in the past.
“The project is still ongoing,” said Baysinger. “It’s a wealth of stuff that we have. We want to make it available to researchers and also preserve it.”