The document discusses ways to improve the searchability and usability of the ADST Oral History Project database. It proposes adding metadata tags to interviews to allow searching by specific terms or events across multiple interviews from different perspectives. This would direct users more quickly to the relevant sections rather than having to search entire interview transcripts. Creating an Access database of keywords and assigning trained interns or students to add tags could help "data mine" the collection. However, it would be a lengthy project requiring ongoing maintenance to maximize the database's research value as more interviews are added.

1. ADST Oral History Project
Taking it to the next level for users and researchers

2. ADST Oral History Project
 A primary source of first-hand historical accounts
 A rich, detailed, objective database in its
aggregation
 An untapped treasure trove for researchers
 A handy tool for FSO’s at post and in bureaus

3. How do we tap it, how do we make the
treasure available to the average user or
researcher?
 Make it searchable using multiple search key words
 Google search box already exists
 Table of contents already exists
 List of key words for each submission already exists
 But it is not exactly user friendly because the present search box lacks
the power to cut across individual histories and extract coincidences,
mutualities, chance collaborations that made a difference at post and
in history.
 Also, the search results take us to a whole report, not the piece we
need.

4. Let’s start with a search for my first overseas posting, Guinea-
Bissau:

5. 63 results….not too shabby for a tiny post that
seldom had more than 10 Americans at one
time.

6. Let’s try a more detailed search. Let’s try:
Guinea-Bissau, independence, elections:
59 hits, mostly the same hits as before.

7. These results are scalable to larger and perhaps more
important posts, more results, but few
interlinkages.
But what if we had key words and elements in a
spreadsheet? Better yet, in a database?
The database elements already exist in individual
submissions:
Guinea-Bissau 1974, 1975,
1976, 1977
Portugal USUN London

8. Each oral history has keywords listed at the
beginning of each submission. Somebody
was thinking about the future.

9. Creating an Access database would be the first step
in making this priceless data source minable by
researchers and average users.
 But it would only be a start.
 And it wouldn’t come without a cost.
 Interns could be trained in Access to do the tedious data entry based on
the table of contents listing that we already have.
 But you would need knowledgeable people, perhaps retirees to comb
through the lists of each submission and decide on a controlled but
natural vocabulary of searchable keywords.
 It could also be farmed out to students, to read a submission and
produce tags - a sort of crowd-sourced folksonomy. A resume stuffer if
coordinated through similar programs being conducted by eDiplomacy.
 Either way, it would only be a start.

10. Metadata is the answer!
 The present Google search box only takes you to a whole submission.
Then you have to read through the whole piece to find the pertinent
stuff.
 A better search system involving internal tags would direct the
researcher to the section or the paragraph of the entire submission
that contained the information required.
 For example, Let’s type in the box “Succession in Egypt,” a search I
actually performed when I was acting mgmt counselor in Cairo in
2006.

11. 278 results. The first one is always interesting. Maybe we
will get lucky!
The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs ...
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
Succession issue ... Afterwards, he was sent to open a clinic in Luxor in upper Egypt. ... When she married
my father, she was 25, and they went to Egypt that.
www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/McClanahan,%20Grant%20V.toc.pdf

12. Ugh! The whole report!
But we see that he was there 1946-1954, and we know what happened 1952-1954,
succession from King Farouk to the free Officer’s Movement to Naguib to Nasser!
Bull’s eye. Almost. We only have one account. We still need context.

13. Application of subject tags to each subsection, each paragraph,
would assist the researcher by enabling him/her to directly find the
information needed, based on a key word search, and across
multiple records:
 The Ambassador’s perspective
 The DCM’s perspective
 The political officer’s perspective
 The Admin officer’s perspective
 The Ambo’s secretary’s perspective
 The desk officer’s perspective
 The assistant secretary’s perspective
 The consular officer’s perspective

14. That’s probably enough for today.
 This would be a lengthy project
 It may involve some costs, though I would imagine grant funding organizations
would leap at the chance to be involved with such a project, especially in the
museum, archives, and library world.
 It would require constant maintenance, even more so because it would make
oral histories much more useful and hence much more popular (more
submissions, more views of ad space, more usage).
 Questions?