Digitisation of the South Asian oral history archive

Project start date: 2006-03 Project end date: 2009-02
The Centre of South Asian Studies won a Resource Enhancement Grant from the AHRC to begin the digitisation of its oral history collections. There are around 300 recordings in this collection, mostly held on audio cassette, with some reel-to-reel tape recordings as well. The project was completed in 2009 - the interviews, transcripts and various search functions are now available on the Centre of South Asian Studies' website.
Subject domains: 
Era(s): 
Methods usedCategory
Resource sharingCommunication and collaboration
IndexingData analysis
Data modellingData structuring and enhancement
Sound recordingData capture
DocumentationStrategy and project management
Searching and queryingData analysis
Server scriptingData publishing and dissemination
Sound compressionData structuring and enhancement
Sound editingData structuring and enhancement
Streaming mediaData publishing and dissemination
Web browser scriptingData publishing and dissemination
CurationStrategy and project management
soundContent types
textContent types
historyDiscipline
Funding sources: 
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Content types created: 
Dataset/structured data, Sound, Text
Software tools used: 
MySQL, PHP, Adobe Acrobat, Logic, MS Office
Source material used:  
Sound recordings, meta data, and transcripts
Digital resource created:  
The recordings are mostly oral history interviews, although there are some lexicons of obscure languages, recordings of music and one or two cases where letters are read out. All relate to South Asia, most to India and Pakistan - a great number of which deal explicitly with the period before, during and after partition.
Access to digital resource:  
Open Access
Data Formats created: 
MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) (for webstream), Waveform Audio file (WAV) (for archiving), Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) (transcripts)
mp3 files were created from WAV audio files for the purpose of web delivery of the content.
Metadata standards employed: 
Dublin Core, qualified (DC)

Institutions affiliated with this project: 

UK HE institutions involved:
University of Cambridge

Project staff and expertise: 

Principal staff member:Kevin Greenbank, Ivan Coleby
Other staff:
External expertise:


Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record
Author(s) of recordKevin Greenbank
TitleDigitisation of the South Asian oral history archive
Record created2008-08-21
Record updated2010-06-30 10:58
URL of recordhttp://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2289
Citation of recordKevin Greenbank: Digitisation of the South Asian oral history archive.
<http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2289>
created: 2008-08-21, last updated 2010-06-30 10:58