Marketing Software Puts the "Oral" Back in Oral History

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A University at Buffalo historian has developed a unique application for a software originally developed for the industrial market-research field that has enormous implications for thousands of audio and video history collections held in archives around the world.

Michael Frisch, UB professor of history and senior research scholar, has found a way to make these collections useful tools for education and research by rendering them, for the first time, searchable and accessible.

The application maintains the integrity of the original, firsthand oral documentation and obviates the need to use voice-to-page transcription or voice-recognition software.

"This is revolutionary," says Frisch. "This process collapses what has been the great distance between archival service and scholarship and posterity, and makes collections immediately available for educational and popular use.

Frisch says it will be an enormous boon to oral historians, archivists, social-science researchers and documentarians who work in audio, video, film or multimedia formats. They will be able to deal with the content in its authentic, spontaneous, richly affective form.

The process employs Documat LLC's relatively new Interclipper software to record archived oral material directly into a computer and permits the material to be indexed, searched and retrieved.

It is a principal tool of Frisch's company, The Randforce Associates, which consults and assists users in the new field of digital oral collection management.

Randforce has just moved into the UB Technology Incubator, a multi-tenant facility that helps technology-intensive companies develop and grow by providing business services and access to UB resources such as computer network and libraries.

Frisch points out that oral and video history tapes are important because they offer deeply textured, historically important first-person accounts and eyewitness reports of important events and personages. The conventional way of handling oral documents has been to turn the voice or image into text in the form of collection catalogues, logs, indexes and, most often, transcripts.

"These are produced at great -- sometimes enormous -- cost," he says. "The results are voluminous and expensively produced written texts that are only marginally easier to search and seldom indexed for ideas or concepts.

"The end result," he adds, "is at a considerable remove from the original format in which authority was carried in the voice and image -- the reason the tapes were produced in the first place."

Interclipper software originally was developed for the industrial market-research field. It works well for oral-collection management, he says, because it permits the key passages in oral and video history texts to be tagged, coded and copied into an interactive database that can be searched, indexed, catalogued and recopied.

Once transformed into interactive oral databases, they can incorporate photos, video clips and other materials that can be browsed and linked to further resources. It makes it much easier, for instance, for a curator to produce browsable, interactive CD-ROMs containing all or part of a collection.

"To apply this market research software effectively to the very different needs of an oral history collection is complicated, however, and has a steep learning curve," Frisch says. That's where Randforce comes in.

He says the company will facilitate use of this technology by helping curators and archivists develop subject-specific codes and index categories for individual collections and assist them in the construction of the taxonomy. Once in place, the program will work in much the same way as a good written index works to offer direct access to the contents of a collection.

In this case, however, the end product will have the additional advantages of digital immediacy, richly enhanced levels of cross-referencing and searching, and immediate output of selected passages.

Randforce is a small company that offers a range of services from simple consultaton to training and full project development, depending on client need.

"We decided to form a full-service, technology-based consulting firm," says Frisch, "because the level of interest, visibility and open-ended potential for our services was very high, even before we made any announcements or began any marketing operation."

In fact, Randforce already is at work on two contracted projects through which it is exploring the application of its core technology to specific oral-history collections. Three other contracts are being negotiated and the company has been asked to help develop three additional major grant applications for projects that, if funded, will rely on the services Randforce provides.

Frisch says that as the company's practice develops he sees the possibility of partnering with the software developer to produce software dedicated to oral history collection management and documentary multi-media production.

Although not a formal part of his professional responsibilities at UB, Frisch says the new firm's work can be considered a spin-off of the intellectual capital developed through three decades as a UB professor of history. He retired early to develop this work, but continues as a senior research scholar at the university.

Frisch chaired the Department of American Studies at UB from 1984-91 He is the former editor of the Oral History Review and the author of more than 100 articles and four books, including "A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History" (SUNY Press, 1990), a classic work in the field used in many university courses.

Frish has two associates in this endeavor, Judith Weiland and Christine Zinni. Weiland, who completed her master's degree in history at UB, currently is working on contract with the UB Law School Alumni Association on the Interclipper processing of the association's new oral history collection. Zinni, a documentary filmmaker and ethnographer, is completing her Ph.D. in American Studies at UB, and currently is working on a family oral history project as a contracted oral historian/videographer.

The UB Technology Incubator is part of the university's Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach (STOR), which assists technology start-ups by providing affordable business services, flexible rental terms and office and laboratory space. The incubator currently is home to 17 companies, most of which have close links to UB. To learn more about the incubator visit http://www.STOR.buffalo.edu or call 716-636-2568.

The Randforce Associates takes its name from the Randforce Entertainment Corporation founded by Frisch's father and uncle, pioneers in the movie industry, who operated a circuit of movie theaters in New York City for more than 45 years.

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