Submariners' Stories site slice for Meeja header (comp)

Building a reusable Oral History project Website

We – Meeja – are an unusual mixture of Web Developers, data specialists and Oral Historians.

Our approach was to build an Oral History project Website to satisfy the largest range of OH projects – put simply a template that could be used by any OH project, without having to bear the often high prices of custom Web development for each project.

We started this by working hard on studying, then analysing what would be required to deliver an oral history project to the public.

As we all know, Oral History projects take a huge amount of energy and effort to create, so we wanted to deliver a Website that easily showed all of the aspects of the project in the most accessible way for the visitor.

## Structure

We wanted to give the visitor to the OH site the largest number of ways to engage with the project – help them find an appealing thread that they could pull on, encouraging them to explore all the gathered content.

Broadly the site enables visitors to explore collections of:

From each of these collection pages, visitors can easily explore deeper into the content by access individual pages:

## Interviewees profiles

Unsurprisingly the Interviewee’s profile brings together lots of items. On these individual pages visitors can view:

  • A summary of their lives, as related to the OH project
  • Their full length interview
  • Links to the full text transcript of the interview 
  • A graphical list linking to all of their short audio snippets
  • Also any photos they have submitted to the project 

The audio snippets can be listened to on the page, or by clicking on the associated image, listened to on the page dedicated to the snippet.

Each of the photos are stored with the museum collection standard information about ownership / copyright.

## Linking items via data

Our approach is to store these items as data, which brings the huge advantage that these items can be easily linked together without having to recreate the individual items each time they’re displayed.

By way of example, this audio snippet is linked by data to the snippet’s overarching theme, as well as the profile of the interviewee.

## Get in touch

Happy to discuss with anyone how we could work with you to implement or adapt this into any of your OH projects.

Simon Perry

Meeja