Voices: Oral History Takes Center Stage in Cooperative Museum Project
Matt Nickerson, Southern Utah University, USA
http://archive.li.suu.edu/voices/voices.html

Demonstration: Demonstrations 2

Voices of the Colorado Plateau is a an online museum featuring web-based multimedia exhibits uniting oral history with historical images to portray the complex history of the Colorado Plateau. This unique project integrates materials from eight different institutions in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada in an exciting cooperative venture that is erasing borders, shrinking distances and improving access. This demonstration will showcase the exhibits and presenters will discuss the technolgies used to create them. The innovative online exhibits are created using Macromedia Flash 5.0. This powerful multimedia tool allows designers to create a rich interactive environment that highlights the human history captured in oral history and historic photographs. Curators select 2-5 minute excerpts from oral interviews covering a wide range of topics addressing the life and landscape of the region. The selected portions are illustrated with a sampling of images taken from consortium collections to create brief historical documentaries. Each vignette serves as an invitation to listen to the entire oral history interview and as an introduction to other stories included in the exhibit. Conference participants who visit the demonstration will receive an e-card (mini CD) with information about the project and samples from the web museum.