First Person Oral Histories follow the feature set and format of the old American Centuries website. They offer multi-page, multi-clip oral histories accompanied by rich image and text historical context. First Person Oral Histories are made up of two levels of pages, each with its own template:

• Oral History Person – this is the menu page for the interviewed person. It provides links to their story pages, as well as an introduction, a timeline and a list of resources
• Oral History Story – story pages present the interview clips with transcriptions alongside of contextualizing interpretive material. These pages also include Related Items and navigation to the other stories from the same person.

Getting Started

Audio Clips

All audio clips from the original feature have been uploaded to the Media Library. Unfortunately, the files are not named consistently so care must be taken to ensure that the correct clip is being used. Most clips are named according to the following convention: “oh-[person’s last name+story number]-[clip number].mp3″ Example: “oh-elliot4-2.mp3” —which would be the second audio clip on the fourth Ray Elliot story page. ” Many clips don’t specify the story page, so again — double check by listening to the beginning of the clip.

Once the story pages for a newly created oral history person have been created, you can attach all the audio files to the correct OH story pages: in the Media Library, filter “All Media Items” by “Audio”, then, locate the clips for that person by reading the file names, in the “Uploaded to” column, click the “Attach” link which pops open the “Attach to existing content” window. Type the person’s last name in the search field and click “Search” which will limit the list to the pages you need, select the correct page by clicking the radio button then click the “Select” button.

Images

Before creating oral history pages on the new Centuries site, you’ll need to recreate the images and gather them together for the oral history person you’re working on. In some cases you can right-click and save to your local computer the image files from “View large image” popup window. In other cases you might have to search the internet for a better, larger version of the image you need since many of the images on the original First Person pages in the old website are small and low resolution. This is a case-be-case judgement call.

If you need to locate a better, larger version of an image, you can refer to the image caption/credits from the old Centuries site which typically includes a citation to the image’s source. This will enable you to find the original image file and download a high-res version of it to your computer. Open the high res image in image editing software and crop, color correct, etc then save at 72dpi and 800 pixels wide using the following naming convention: [oh]-[person name]-[image shortname].jpg; for example: “oh-elliot-tag-incoming.jpg”. Upload the new jpgs to the Media Library.