Professional News

UK Oral Historian Takes Part in StoryCorps Summit

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LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 6, 2014) — Doug Boyd, director of the University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, recently participated in “Oral Histories Online: Ethics, Legality, and Opportunity” where a select group of national leaders in oral history discussed the future of the StoryCorps archive.

Boyd was among a group of outside experts that included Bertram Lyons, folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center and AVPreserve member, and John Neuenschwander, author of "A Guide to Oral History and the Law" on legal issues and oral history, at the day-long summit. The event covered a broad range of issues that are challenging to archives around the world and included the development of strategies to answer these issues.

The summit was one of several events presented in October during National Archives Month by the Recording and Archive department at StoryCorps. The StoryCorps’ archive comprises one of the first and largest born-digital oral history collections. It incorporates more than 55,000 interviews, recorded in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

Boyd is a national leader regarding oral history, archives and digital technologies. He heads up the team that created and operates Oral History in the Digital Age, a website that connects researchers to the latest information on digital technologies pertaining to all phases of the oral history process. He also led the research team that envisioned, designed and implemented the open source OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) system. The OHMS tool connects a user from a search term in a transcript or an index to the corresponding moment in the online audio or video.

Before taking the director position at Nunn Center at UK Libraries, Boyd administered digital programs for the University of Alabama Libraries, served as the director of the Kentucky Oral History Commission, and prior to that worked as the senior archivist for the oral history collection at the Kentucky Historical Society.   

MEDIA CONTACT: Whitney Hale, 859-257-8716; whitney.hale@uky.edu