Giving a Voice to Audio Collections

Is the audio portion of your digital collection lacking? Do you feel that audio collections are archaic and creating an audio collection is both time consuming and expensive? This type of thinking is antiquated. You can skip transcription altogether and focus solely on indexing by using free software like OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synthesizer). During our presentation we will show you how to use this free software. If you want to transcribe yourself and save time you can use free software such as Express Scribe and use USB foot pedals to speed up the process. In addition to these options, accurate automated speech to text technology is on the way and costs about 5% the price of what standard transcribing services charge. At this price, audio collections should be making a comeback and be used to supplement and enhance digital collections. This presentation will be twofold. The first half will focus on some of the audio collections being put together at the University of Dubuque and how the audio collection is being created and used in the classroom. The second half of the presentation will focus on the up-and-coming technology transforming audio collections