The Brandywine Valley Oral History Project (review)

The Hagley Museum and Library's ambitious new digital exhibit, The Brandywine Valley Oral History Project (BVOHP), serves as a model for institutions wanting to integrate a variety of digital platforms to collectively tell history in a way that is user-driven, engaging, and accessible. So much more than just links to audio clips, the project adds visual, textual, and spatial layers to the oral histories to create vibrant digital snapshots of work and life along the Brandywine River outside of Wilmington, Delaware. This multilayered exhibit encourages engagement with a variety of entry points into the oral histories and associated digital assets. Indexed, time-stamped transcriptions and metadata search tools allow researchers to sort through the recordings for pertinent information in a fraction of the time it would take otherwise. This ease of information discovery allows for not just locating what users want to find; it also encourages exploration into Hagley's other extensive digital collections.

Hagley designed the BVOHP around oral histories conducted with former Dupont Company employees and community members around New Castle County, Delaware, between the 1950s and 1980s. Collectively, the workers provide an oral history of evolving labor and industry in the region. The DuPont Company Powder Yards operated on the Brandywine from 1802 to 1921 on the site the where the Hagley Museum and Library now sits. The museum and library exist to further the study of business and technology in America. This digital exhibit, funded by Delaware Humanities, helps Hagley meet its mission while simultaneously providing researchers with layered material to draw from. While many interviews focus on working in the black powder yards and other local industries, interviewees also discuss topics ranging from family life to the immigrant experience. Their stories are both hyperlocal—unique to that area—and also universally relatable. This depth of storytelling illuminates the intertwined nature of work and home life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the importance of community.

Notable is how the information is accessed, with the site user in the control seat. Members of the Hagley Oral History Office have spliced the interviews into shorter, thematic sections with topics like "Mill Explosions" or "Childhood and Mischief." Users are then able to home in on topics they are interested in hearing about, and they can select excerpts from a list of interview descriptions. Anyone interested in learning more has the opportunity to click through to the entire interview, accessible through the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) viewer, which displays a scrolling, searchable, indexed transcript. This tool allows users to quickly locate material they are interested in, eliminating cumbersome browsing through long interviews. Anyone who has sat through hours upon hours of oral histories to stumble upon great twenty-second tidbits will appreciate the usability.

In addition to textual analysis capabilities, the site offers opportunities to engage with the collection through other entry points. This exhibit integrates images from Hagley's digital archives through the content management system Islandora. In most cases, the paired images are of the very person or place being discussed, like a family photo next to the interview of Aloysius "Al" Rowe. These visuals help bring the audio to life to make connections between the oral and visual collections. A subpage of the exhibit, titled "Brandywine Places," also features a simple map that locates the places mentioned in oral histories, from mills and factories to local places like Chicken Alley and Squirrel Run (https://www.hagley.org/research/digital-exhibits/brandywine-places). The map, too, links to photos and documents in the digital archive. This spatial rendering of locations from the oral histories helps the listener locate not just the places of work, but also everything from local watering holes like Toy's Tavern to community churches and schools.

The interviews are overflowing with knowledge of occupations long gone or institutions unrecognizable from their current state, like George M. Crist speaking about how the workers at...