Mexicanos in Oregon: Improving Access to their stories through metadata
Valeria Dávila Gronros, Oregon State University Libraries and Press
In spring term 2020, the Oregon Multicultural Archives at the Oregon State University Libraries & Press collaborated with the OSU course Ethnic Studies 416/516 Migrant Health on an oral history assignment involving the Erlinda Gonzales-Berry Papers Collection, 1943-2010.
The students listened to the oral history interviews and wrote interviewee bios, summaries, and historical context essays in Spanish and English, as the majority of the interviews are in Spanish. Parting from the bilingual metadata created by the students, I reviewed, corrected, and in some cases, translated and created metadata to enhance the online finding aid and help make these oral histories more discoverable and accessible for research.
In April 15, 2021, I presented a poster about this project at the AMIA 2021 Spring Conference. Focused on my metadata creation and revision workflow, this poster offered the audience an easy-to-implement model for improving oral history discoverability and access especially useful to academic libraries and archives.
For more information, I wrote about the process here: https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/oregonmulticulturalarchives/2021/04/16/amia-2021-mexicanos-in-oregon/
Thanks for reading!
Valeria.
AMIA at the University of Alabama 