No abstract

Louisville, Kentucky, has a rich musical heritage, including an underground scene that influenced the sound of not only punk, indie, and hardcore, but also of popular music regionally, nationally, and internationally. In 2013, faced with the loss of several members of this scene over the course of twelve months, archivists in the University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections launched a project to document this important slice of Louisville's musical culture. The Louisville Underground Music Archive (LUMA) project successfully applies documentation strategy, paired with a strong community engagement component, to address the gap in the historical record related to this culture.

Like many cultural heritage institutions, the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Louisville faces the dichotomy of material abundance and budgetary scarcity. Driven by the desire to make historical primary sources accessible online, this organization harnessed the power of the public to transcribe the Louisville Leader, an historic African American newspaper. The first sections of this article define crowdsourcing and describe how it was implemented at the University of Louisville, including the tools adopted and the process used. The latter sections outline the marketing strategy, the public response, and lessons learned from this ongoing project.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to provide a practical example of a process repositories may follow in making oral history interviews available online. Design/methodology/approach -The paper examines the decisions that must be made in the course of making analog audio available online. Legal, ethical and technical decisions are examined and evaluated in the context of one repository's experience. Issues such as copyright, privacy and defamation are examined, as are technical issues around analog audio capture and access. Different options for presenting the oral histories to the public are evaluated in light of ease of production and access. Findings -The paper finds it is possible to provide easy-to-use online access to oral histories even in the absence of a large budget and programming staff to create cutting-edge tools. Practical implications -Many more repositories could be making their oral histories available online. There are many decisions to be made along the way, but individual repositories should not be afraid to make these decisions in their own context. While much of the literature available heretofore has focused on offerings of highly resourced repositories that are able to create "one-off" databases, off-the-shelf applications such as CONTENTdm do a fine job of providing access to these materials. Originality/value -The paper speaks to repositories looking for a practical model they can follow for making interviews available online. Rather than presenting a new technical approach, it demonstrates how existing and widespread technologies can be used for this purpose. It is aimed particularly at institutions with relatively fewer technological resources.

No abstract