Pass the Word (review)

Oral history centers and archives often concern themselves a great deal with the ability to faithfully represent to the public the contents of their collections. Some of these archives possess hundreds of projects collected over several decades, all at various stages of completion and public access. How to relate these to each other in an all-encompassing collection guide, and then deliver this guide to the public in an easily accessible manner can sometimes seem like a herculean task. Consider this quandary, but now at a much more imposing level, and you will have a small sense of what the Kentucky Oral History Commission (KOHC) decided to undertake with their online collection portal, Pass the Word.

The website, maintained by the Kentucky Historical Society, is the twenty-first-century edition of an effort two decades in the making: the attempt to catalog every oral history project in the state of Kentucky. KOHC initially tackled this task in 1991 with a paper survey of collection sites in the state that led to the publication of The Guide to Kentucky Oral History, which at that time identified over twenty-five thousand interviews at forty-one repositories. In 2001, KOHC enlisted their senior archivist, Doug Boyd, to help turn the guide into a searchable online database. Then in 2011, thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Kentucky Historical Foundation, work began on the Pass the Word platform. Because of the grant-funded efforts of one KOHC staff member and two interns from 2011-2013, Pass the Word now features connections to 921 collections from over one hundred repositories in Kentucky, representing over thirty-five thousand oral histories.

How Pass the Word is populated with these records is an interesting model of collaboration between KOHC and various Kentucky repositories. During the two years of grant-funded work, KOHC established points of contact among its participating archives and historical centers. These contacts were trained in the Pass the Word system; specifically, they were shown how to create a collection record and populate it with individual interview records. In this way, the overall success of Pass the Word is not wholly dependent on temporary start-up positions; instead, the endeavor has created a statewide network of interested parties that continue to update the database. This obviously also solves a major problem associated with a majority of collection-guide publications: most become outdated mere months after completion.

These collections (or what some would call projects) are the main actors of the website. When you first arrive at the homepage, two of the four major modules reference the collection level directly: one focuses on the newest collections added to the site and the other on a series of five projects presented in a slideshow format labeled “Featured Collections.” Clicking on any of these offerings will take you directly to the complete collection record. As for the modules themselves, the “Featured Collections” section is quite effective with a mix of photography and summary text, while “New Collections” could be better served with corresponding upload dates and/or a trailing link that opens a longer listing of recently added items (the module limits you four). The other modules provide links to recent oral history news items as well as a general “About” section detailing the history of the Pass the Word initiative.

Across the top of the home page are a series of tabs followed by a search window that will investigate every metadata field of the entire site. A search for bourbon, for instance, not only returned the oral history project I already knew existed, but another based on the county (yes, there is an actual Bourbon County, KY), and still other projects that simply include interviewees who hail from the county. For a more refined search, the aforementioned tabs labeled “Collections” and “Interviews” are appropriate. The “Collections” tab leads to a page with an alphabetical listing of every collection in the database. The list does not further populate until...