The addition of sound or video can greatly enhance any class lecture, presentation, or website. It is exciting to think about the ease, accessibility, and possibilities of sound and video files. The Washington
State oral history site was really fascinating. It was nice to be able to read a general transcript of what people discussed, but the reality of their voices added a whole new dimension. Since these oral histories were collected in the 1970s, they serve as primary sources in more than one way. I can imagine using these sound clips in class, or developing an assignment where students use the recorded stories as sources paired with other primary and secondary materials. Oral histories seem to be good candidates to distribute through websites. They are manageable file sizes and, as Trevor Bond explains, the technology is not prohibitively expensive. It is good that the university has resources dedicated to maintaining their files.
Although I am not planning to create a website, I enjoyed reading Cohen and Rosenzweig’s chapter on building an audience. It is useful to know as much as possible about how search engines work. Not only does it matter to website creators, but it greatly matters when we do online searches. Understanding how we receive results can help us tailor our searches to be as accurate as possible. In light of YouTube’s popularity, it would be interesting to see their server logs or to understand who visits their site.
The most thrilling part of my browsing this week was finding YouTube footage from the 1910 Jack Johnson-Jeff Jeffries prizefight. When I was working on my master’s thesis (on the riots following the prizefight) in 2004 I tried many different sources to find the fight footage—interlibrary loan, ESPN archives, state and university archives. When Ken Burns released his 2005 Jack Johnson documentary, I was envious of the great footage he located. Of course, his resources were much more vast than mine. Yet there on YouTube is footage of many of Johnson’s famous fights, including great knockout scenes from 1910 and Jim Jeffries training footage. I’m sure I will use the films in future presentations or lectures. I don’t know how these people located this information, but I am so glad they did. Some fight fans even created their own Jack Johnson tribute montages of still photos and fight footage.
Sites like YouTube certainly raise questions of copyright. Although the Johnson-Jeffries footage should be considered in the public domain, it is possible that people who re-released the footage secured copyright. As long as I just want to use the footage for my own viewing or leave it on YouTube, then I don’t encounter issues. It seems difficult to track down complete details on some of the footage I viewed, although I didn’t directly contact any of the users who posted the video. For example, I wanted to know who originally developed some of the fight films. A news company? Were the films broadcast in movie theaters? Did they use the original narration/narrator? It is exciting to think about sources that will be available to researchers years from now, and how important online preservation is today.
