At Sutherland Library we have a bunch of oral histories stored as .wav files. We would like to publish them online. My first thought is a blog with enclosures for the audio files, which I can turn into a Podcast.
But I think we should engage with the whole idea of Open Government and Open Data and I'm not sure if this is the best way to go to meet those objectives. So I'm calling on all developers, Gov 2.0 experts and mashup artists to give me some advice...
Keeping in mind that I'm not a developer, so I need point and click tools, how would you suggest we go about publishing these oral histories and related data? If you were going to use this data in mashup how would you like it presented?
Where should I store the audio files online? The Internet Archive, a Cloud service like Box.net or on our web host's virtual server?
Apart from the blog itself, is an RSS feed an appropriate format to make the data available for public consumption? If not, how else could it be published?
How Can I turn the standard blog RSS feed into something more useful? For instance, each oral history discusses a number of locations in and around the Shire and it would be really good to geo-tag them. Should explore Yahoo! Pipes or Google Spreadsheets for different outputs?
Please, please, please lend me your expertise and lead me onto the righteous path by leaving a comment.
Friday 30 October 2009
Looking for Advice from more Technical Folk than Me
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To keep it simple, yes just publish the metadata as an RSS feed, or failing that publish them as a CSV file. Alternatively Google Spreadsheets is a easy way to host and publish this data. You might find this site helpful too http://www.batchgeocode.com/ to get your geocoding completed.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of where to host the actual audio files, that may come down to a question of volumes and traffic.
One thing you haven't mentioned is under what license scheme you intend to release them?
It will be hard to recommend how to share these audio files if the licensing is not specified.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few parameters you should collect before approching a tech solution.
1. What is the quantity and capacity of the audios?
2. How are they indexed if at all?
3. What is the Meta Data for each item? category, speaker, date etc.
4. What licence does these audio files carry?
These will give some initial information and direction to a solution.
I'm pushing for a CC-attribution-non commercial license. I orginally thought of including a no derivatives clause for the actual audio, but I think that might be counter-productive. Remixers will probably want to cherry pick bits and pieces.
ReplyDeleteWe have a bit more metadata than what would be included in the standard RSS feed so I think I'll have a play with Google Spreadsheets and explore their output/publishing options.
Thanks for the tip about Geocoding James. I'm following that one up.
http://internetarchive.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/audio-and-video-improvements/
ReplyDeleteI'm not technical at all!!! But looking or sending a message to the above link or below may help as they have wonderful audio downloads
http://www.archive.org/details/audio