Skip to Main Content
Addlestone Library is open to the College of Charleston community and affiliates via card access. Visitors may access Addlestone Library Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm, and must present a government issued ID and sign in upon entry.

Lowcountry Oral History Initiative (LOHI) Toolkit: Share Your Project

How-to guide for community and campus oral history projects brought to you by the Lowcountry Oral History Initiative at the College of Charleston Libraries.

Step 5 Oral History banner image

Make Your Project Accessible

It's time to share!
Now that you have planned, interviewed, and processed your oral histories, the last step is to make the oral histories accessible. This section will provide you with information about the ways that you can share your oral history project. Your project team can work independently to host the oral histories online, donate them to an archive, or partner with the Lowcountry Oral History Initiative (LOHI) to share your oral history project. This section shares information and resources for all of these options. 

Sharing Your Project Independently

If you are going to work independently to share your oral histories, you can use a website builder—some are called web content management systems—to build your website. Website builders vary in cost and the level of technical expertise required.

Website Builders and Video Hosting
Two website builders to consider are Wordpress and Omeka. Both will allow you to use templates to help design the pages of your website. You can upload your oral histories to a video hosting website, YouTube or Vimeo, and link or embed the video to your WordPress or Omeka website. Of the two, WordPress is the easiest to use. While Omeka might be a bit more set up, it is used by libraries and archives to display archival content, and there is a set up manual available online.

An important consideration: Do you want to make the video downloadable or not? Depending on the video content sharing website that you use, you will want to select the correct choices to make it downloadable or not downloadable. 

For more information about building a website, see the Independent Video Sharing document on this page's Related Materials column. 

If your organization has an existing website, you can upload your oral histories to a video content sharing website, YouTube or Vimeo, and embed them in your website. Website building platforms like WordPress have automated some of the embedding work, whereas a platform like Omeka will require a higher degree of technical skills.

An important consideration: do you want to make the video downloadable or not. Depending on the video content sharing website that you use, you will want to select the correct choices to make it downloadable or not downloadable. 

For more information on video content sharing websites, see Related Materials: Independent Video Sharing.

What is equally as important as providing access? A preservation plan. Planning for preservation is an essential part of your oral history project, and those large video files are a clue that oral history projects need a good amount of storage. Because there will likely be a cost associated with storage, it's also an important step to plan for to ensure funds are set aside to cover it.

The Rule of 3
It may feel like you have taken care of this step because you have already organized and saved your files. But for the video file, maintaining a single copy is not enough! Digital files can break or become corrupted; the computer they are on can fail; and a server they are on can melt (yes, melt!). So archives recommend the Rule of 3—the practice of maintaining three copies of the digital collection files (like oral history projects) and storing them in cloud-based spaces. This is an insurance policy that will protect all of the hard work and time that went into creating the oral histories. It ensures that future generations will continue to be able to use these primary source materials to learn about the past. 

Cloud-based options include:

  • Box
  • Dropbox
  • Google Drive
  • Microsoft OneDrive
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Amazon Web Services

For small oral history projects, cloud-based storage options will be fairly low cost. Cloud-based storage is also quite reliable.

For more information about cloud-based storage options, see the Preservation: Cloud-Based Planning document located on this page's Related Materials column.

Partner with the Lowcountry Oral History Initiative (LOHI)

What is LOHI?
The Lowcountry Oral History Initiative (LOHI) is an initiative that aims to host oral history collections created by its community partners and other organizations. LOHI's goal is to record, preserve, and make available audio and video recordings that document the memories of historically marginalized communities. These oral histories will enrich the historic record and enrich our understanding of regional history and culture. The sister project of the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL) and the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI), LOHI is also housed in the College of Charleston Libraries. For more information about the project, please see a digital copy of the LOHI informational brochure in the Related Materials column.

It is worth nothing that the LCDL and LOHI are interconnected but different. LCDL is a digital library that partners with dozens of regional organizations to provide online access to their archival materials. This includes letters, ledgers, photographs, many other types of print material, and, oral histories. Because oral histories are best viewed on a website platform designed for them, LOHI uses a discovery platform specifically designed for oral histories. Many of the oral history collections in LOHI link back to LCDL. (The next tab shares more about the LOHI/LCDL connection.)

Who does LOHI work with?
LOHI works with community organizations in the Lowcountry region who have Lowcountry-based oral history projects.

How do I become a LOHI partner?
Reach out! You can email LOHI's project coordinator, Dr. Alexis Johnson, to set up a time discuss LOHI. Dr. Johnson will answer questions you have about LOHI, share more about how LOHI works, and hear more about your project. 
Community Oral Historian and LOHI Project Coordinator: Dr. Alexis Johnson
Email: johnsona18 at cofc dot edu

What are the advantages of partnering with LOHI?
LOHI offers potential partners several advantages.

  • LOHI Project Coordinator Dr. Alexis Johnson is an experienced community oral historian and an excellent resource to community organizations who seek to complete oral history projects.
  • Partnership comes with consulting services, equipment loans, metadata training, and file storage. Consulting services may be useful if you have questions throughout the oral history process. Our metadata training will equip your team with the knowledge and skills to write professional metadata (data/information about each oral history), which increase the oral histories' discoverability. Increasing discoverability is important because it means community members and researchers will be able to search for and find the oral history they are looking for.  
  • Another advantage of partnering with LOHI is that our website is built specifically for displaying oral histories. Oral history videos are displayed alongside the transcript so the user can listen and read along. The LOHI website is user friendly and optimized for searchability, and the LOHI team takes on the responsibility of website security and maintenance. LOHI is also permanent and stable because its staff, websites infrastructure and security, and storage capacity are built as part of the College of Charleston's Library system. 
  • LOHI offers free file storage. Because access and preservation are two sides of the same coin, LOHI stores a copy of oral history project materials as part of your Rule of 3 preservation plan.
  • Your community organization remains the holding institution—or the legal holder—of the oral histories. LOHI is a platform to help community organizations share their oral histories, but it is not an archive, and so will not take possession of your oral histories. 
  • There is no fee or cost to become a LOHI partner. Building on the mission of its sister websites (the Lowcountry Digital Library and the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative), LOHI's mission is to help preserve and share the history of the Lowcountry, particularly marginalized and underrepresented histories. The best way to do this is to ensure that there is no cost to partnership. LOHI (along with LCDL and LDHI) partnerships are—and will remain—free.

What is required to be a LOHI partner?
To partner with LOHI, organizations need to, first and foremost, want to share their oral history collection with the public. Because LOHI's mission is to help share the Lowcountry's history, partners should be based in/their project should connect to the Lowcountry. Preservation is a top priority at LOHI. Therefore, to fully preserve oral histories and make them highly accessible, LOHI has a list of requirements for partners when they submit an oral history collection. Reach out to learn more!

Partnership with LOHI will not be the right fit for every organization's project. If LOHI does not appear to be a good fit for your organization, be sure to check out the resources in the above section: Sharing Your Project Independently.

Sharing with LOHI is easy!  We offer different methods of sharing to best accommodate your needs.

There are a couple routes to chose from when sharing with LOHI. Your project can stay local to the LOHI website. This option would still allow you to provide access to your oral history project in a controlled manner.  You could link to the platform from your website and give your project a voice!

The second option is to provide wide-spread access. If part of your project goals are to see that your oral histories become highly useful educational and research materials, LOHI partnership will really increase discoverability. LOHI partners' oral history collections can be aggregated—or shared—into the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL). This offers a huge advantage to making your collection discoverable and therefore useable as educational and research materials. LCDL is a well-established online educational and research tool used by thousands of user every month. Additionally, LCDL is a partner of the South Carolina State Library, which means that LCDL collections, including oral histories, are aggregated (shared) into the South Carolina Digital Library. And from there, the collections are aggregated into the Digital Public Library of America. 

Be sure to reach out before starting your project to discuss all of the options!

LOHI offers free file storage for all partners' oral history collections. Creating digital access and preserving digital files are two sides of the same coin. Therefore, LOHI stores a copy of oral history project materials as part of our recommended Rule of 3 preservation plan.

LOHI uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store a copy of the oral history audio/video file that is used to provide online access to oral histories. To preserve all the materials related to the oral history collection—audio/video files, transcripts, metadata, and potentially photographs—LOHI also secures server space to preserve oral history collections. 

Partner with an Existing Archive

To secure permanent care of oral history collections, planning long term stewardship requires financial and human investment. For some oral history projects, donating the oral history collection to an archive is part of the plan from the outset. Others arrive at this option as they find planning this care internally to be a difficult task given available resources.  In both cases, it is helpful to understand the benefits of donating and the importance of finding a good archival fit.

The benefits of donating to an archive: 

  • Professional long term care of your materials
  • Provides a stable and secure digital environment for your oral histories
  • Allows current and future community members, researchers, genealogists, and students to better understand the history your project covers
  • Reduces the workload for the donating organization

To find a good fit, start by exploring potential archives' websites to learn more about them. After exploring their websites, your organization's oral history project coordinator can reach out and set up meetings with archives. The project coordinator and other team or community representatives can attend the meeting with the archivists. Their websites may tell you some of what you need to know, but this conversation is where you hope to receive thorough answers. Here are some questions you may consider to ensure you learn everything you need to know about the archives you are considering.

  • What are the archive's collecting areas? Does your project’s scope fit with their existing collecting areas? 
  • How does the archive's mission statement and goals align with your organization's goals and values for your oral history project?
  • What is the archive's relationship with the communities represented in the oral histories? Do they have examples of collections or projects that will help you understand their relationship with these communities?
  • What are your expectations regarding the public's access? How does the archive (and its broader community) expect the oral histories to be used? Many archives are attached to libraries and/or schools. So for example, will the oral histories be used for research purposes, classroom instruction, both, or other?
  • How will the institution be making the oral histories available online? How do they handle restricted access to materials like oral histories?
  • What will be the ongoing relationship with your organization? How will people from your community access the oral histories once donated? 

Donating to an archive has excellent benefits, but it is also important to fully understand what it means to donate. Donating oral histories means:

  • Your organization is handing over care and legal ownership of the project.
  • Donation does not necessarily mean that copyright is being transferred. Copyright terms and agreement is a conversation your organization should have with the archive.
  • You will not lose access as long as the archive plans to make them publicly available online. It will take time for them to provide online access though, so if this is a concern, you may want to ask about a timeline. 
  • Your organization can no longer dictate who can/cannot have access to them. It is important to understand, therefore, what the archive would do if someone, for example, wanted their oral history removed from online access.
  • Donation is a permanent decision. Once oral histories are donated, the archive is not obligated to give them back if someone changes their mind.

These are important considerations for your team and important considerations to communicate to your interviewees.

Helpful Links