The Many Uses of Digitized Oral History Collections: Implications for Design

Oral history - and spoken word collections generally - are assuming increasing importance in digital libraries as the storage, transmission and reproduction infrastructure improves. This paper describes three synergistic approaches to user needs analysis, explains how they are being applied to guide the design of systems to provide access oral history collections (using a s test bed the Shoah Foundations collection of over 50,000 videotaped oral history interviews), presents preliminary results from so -called “discount requirements analysis” and an analysis of “early access” requests, and draws some design implications. The results show a wide variety of users and uses of oral history data and a concomitant variety of access points that would be usefu