Hi 4libers,

Does anyone know of something - a kiosk, an iPad app, a web application 
- that:

- Initiates an oral history interview by getting demographic info and 
permission to use and stream for scholarly purposes.
- Goes through a standard set of questions (in our case stuff about the 
Appalachian State experience)
- Stores the metadata, permissions release, and pointers to the audio 
files created for each question in a dbase record
- Processes the audio through speech recognition either in real time or 
post-interview, and populates the dbase record with rendered text (at 
whatever level of accuracy)
- Provide a search interface, where the meatadata, demographic info 
(within reasonable privacy limits), and the transcript (however garbled) 
is searchable.
- Crowd source the improvement of the transcriptions over time
- Package the interface as an app, and set up a machine image on Amazon 
EC2, such that when someone uses the image and points a browser to it, 
it goes through a set up routine so that smaller schools and historical 
societies can set up their own sites in the cloud.  I haven't tried 
streaming on a free tier EC2 server, but you get 30 GB of storage, so 
you could get a fair number of hours of audio (depending on the 
settings) before you have to start paying.

?

Anyone interested in trying it with me if there's nothing already out 
there?  I'm leaning toward iPad, so we'd need iOS, server admin, dbase, 
and media expertise.  I have newbie-but-getting-better skill in the last 
3.  Zero skill in iOS.

Paul
-- 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Paul Orkiszewski*
Coordinator of Library Technology Services / Associate Professor
University Library
Appalachian State University
218 College Street
P.O. Box 32026
Boone, NC 28608-2026

E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 828 262 6588
Fax: 828 262 2797
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