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HISTORY ONLINE
Oral History Online offers indexed searching of oral history collections
available on the Web and provides bibliographic records for oral
history collections in English at academic and historical
repositories around the world and in select private collections.
Oral History Online, which debuted in spring 2004 and is updated quarterly,
currently indexes 75,000 full-text transcriptions, 500 audio and
video files, and contains 7,900 bibliographic records.
By year’s end, the publisher projects those numbers will
quadruple. Several
features recommend using Oral History Online instead of Web search engines (e.g.,
Google). Oral History
Online indexes
only oral history collections and interviews and allows both free
text and controlled vocabulary searching.
Oral History Online provides three basic ways to access collections and
interviews. Table of
Contents provides alphabetically arranged, hyperlinked lists of
repositories and collections, as well as indexes to subject
headings, geographic locations, and an expanding list of historical
events ranging in date from the American Civil War to September 11th.
Find Collections provides eight options for searching
collection description, and Search Interviews allows users to locate
specific documents using over 20 fields.
Subscription fees are based on school enrollments and public
library populations and range from $350 to $3,990.
Consortia discounts are available to academic institutions.
The publisher offers two useful free resources: a directory
of oral history repositories around the world, and a list of the top
100 oral history collections accessed through Oral History
Online.
Oral History Online full functionality is available with 4.0 or higher
versions of Navigator and Explorer, but will work with earlier
versions. A resource
well worth its reasonable price.
Summing up: Recommended. General
and academic collections. Reviewer:
L. K. Speer, Southeast Missouri University

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