Filmed Interviews As A Retrospectoscope: Re-Discovering A 'Lost' Disease

Jim Devine, University of Glasgow, Scotland
Ian Franklin, University of Glasgow, Scotland

Mini-Workshop: Oral History Techniques

In the Virtual Museum of Transfusion Medicine (VMTM) the story of how Rhesus haemolytic disease came to be prevented is being developed on the Web site. This process has concentrated on interviews with relevant figures. The development of affordable, good–quality and user-friendly digital video capture hardware and video-editing software has opened up enormous possibilities for museums and other cultural scientific, and medical heritage organisations to create archival quality digital video resources, recording key people, places and events for current and future generations of scholars and practitioners, and to inform and educate an ever widening audience of the public through electronic delivery of the digitized resources. This paper will examine the rationale of using the digital video medium for interview collection, the interview approach used by the VMTM, and the hardware and software issues involved.