Major Updates to OHMS: Coming Soon

Several years ago, someone at the Library of Congress asked me why the OHMS application and viewer did not utilize one of the emerging timed-text standards. It was frustrating for me because, as an archivist, I take standards and sustainability very seriously. The reason was that when I first created OHMS (the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) in 2008, these standards fell short of accommodating the unique needs of oral history transcripts. I am happy to say that this is all about to change. The  Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History team in the University of Kentucky Libraries has been collaborating with the folks at Aviary to transform OHMS completely, building the WebVTT timed-text standard into OHMS. This integration will significantly impact how OHMS interacts with transcripts and add the ability to use customized and granular time codes in your oral history transcript. Because most speech-to-text platforms, such as Whisper or Trint.com, provide WebVTT exports of the transcripts they create, you can seamlessly import your text into OHMS.

Seamless compatibility with the exports from speech-to-text platforms is a good thing. Still, since we (the humans) should fully authenticate our machine-generated transcripts before they go online, we are also incorporating a powerful transcript editor into OHMS that is optimized for editing and authenticating transcripts containing granular time-code. I’ve been dreaming up this WebVTT capability in OHMS for about five years, so I am excited to see it happen.  Stay tuned; big changes are coming soon!

See the announcement here: