Mexicanos in Oregon: Improving access to their stories through metadata

In spring term 2020, the Oregon Multicultural Archives at the Oregon State University Libraries and 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, my work as a Library Diversity Scholar consisted of reviewing, correcting, and in some cases translating and creating metadata with the aim to enhancing the online finding aid and help make these oral histories more discoverable and accessible for research. By focusing on the metadata creation and revision workflow for this project, this poster offers an easy-to-implement model for improving oral history discoverability and access especially useful to academic libraries and archives.

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Poster presented at AMIA Spring Conference, April 15, 2021 #AMIA21