Linking Connecticut Digital Archives (CTDA) and Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)
Last updated on 13 August 2021 by Jack Dougherty, Trinity College and Elizabeth Rose, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford
Shortlink to this page (all lowercase): bit.ly/ctda-ohms
OHMS makes oral history audio/video interviews more accessible by synchronizing your transcript or index to the corresponding moments in the online playback, and providing word-level search capability. Open-source development of OHMS is led by Doug Boyd at the University of Kentucky Libraries. With help from Mike Kemezis, we found a way to connect OHMS with audio/video interview files stored on the CTDA Islandora platform.
Demos of CTDA audio/video content with OHMS Viewer. Press the "Play" symbol or click timestamps (such as 1:00) for playback at specific points. (Works well in Firefox, Chrome browsers, and testing others...)
Demo 1: Simon Bernstein video interview on CTDA with synchronized transcript, also embedded below:
Demo 2: Gussie Kantrowitz audio interview on CTDA with synchronized index, also embedded below:
Demo 3: Abraham Koppelmann audio interview with more robust synchronized index fields, also embedded below:
Demo 4: Omeka site with OHMS links for oral histories from Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, with goal to place more large-file audio/video content on CTDA
Additional ways to set up OHMS: These sample video and audio files are not stored on CTDA, but demonstrate possible ways.
How it Works:
- Learn about open-source OHMS from University of Kentucky Libraries
- Three parts: 1) Audio/Video content; 2) OHMS Application to synchronize with transcript/index; 3) OHMS Viewer to display to public
- Upload your audio/video content into YOUR server account, such as CTDA, YouTube, Vimeo, Kaltura, SoundCloud, etc.
- Request a free account on the OHMS Application at U of Kentucky to synchronize your transcript/index with your audio/video file on YOUR server. Kentucky does NOT store your large audio/video files.
- In your OHMS Application dashboard, follow CTDA instructions to create pathname to your audio/video datastream. Follow this general format, using the PID of your object (example: 10002:219), and note the difference in URLs for audio (PROXY_MP3) versus video (MP4):
- Select media format and set media host to "host".
- Audio media URL: https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/object/[PID of Object]/datastream/PROXY_MP3/OBJ.mp3
- Video media URL: https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/object/[PID of Object]/datastream/MP4/OBJ.mp4
- Insert either "mp3" or "mp4" in the format field.
- In your OHMS Application dashboard, download the XML file of your synchronized transcript/index with timestamps to your audio/video file. The XML file is small because it contains only the text of the transcript/index, timestamps, and link to the audio/video content, not the large content file.
- To publicly display synchronized content, set up OHMS Viewer on a web server. The easiest solution is to create a paid account for about $30/year with ReclaimHosting, which includes OHMS Viewer in its easy Installatron tool. Or see other server solutions on the OHMS Viewer GitHub repo.
- In your ReclaimHosting cPanel, go to File Manager and place your OHMS XML files into your cachefiles directory, and then link to the xml files.
- Your cachefiles directory is located here: (/home/domain_name/public_html/web_directory/)
- Your links will need to be constructed like this: (http:domain_name/web_directory/viewer.php?cachefile=xml_filename.xml)
- See also option to embed OHMS Viewer in the same site as your audio/video content, or to use the Omeka OHMS plugin.
Additional Resources: