Bird's Eye View

Undergraduate Summer Research in Louie B. Nunn Oral History Center:

Nunn Center director Doug Boyd was chosen to mentor a 2012 Bucks for Brains Summer Research Scholarship recipient.  The Bucks for Brains Summer Research Scholarship program provides undergraduates at UK with "hands-on experience in academic research, working alongside faculty." Since May, Desiree Willis, an undergraduate Secondary Social Studies Education major at UK (Junior), has been working in the Nunn Center as part of this faculty/student research program. 

The research plan developed for Desiree involves the new OHMS interface.  Desiree will develop models and workflows for using the new indexing feature of the OHMS system for presenting large collections of oral histories online and connecting oral histories in the OHMS system to related primary sources, also online. Desiree’s research will create the model for others to follow in utilizing the OHMS system for presenting oral history interviews online.

Desiree has been focusing her efforts on using the OHMS system to index three oral history collections in preparation for online access: 

Women Coal Miners (Entire Collection)

Colonel Arthur L. Kelly American Veterans: World War II (Select interviews)

Charles T. Wethington University of Kentucky Oral History Collection (Select Interviews)

Desiree has made great progress on these interviews, many of which we hope to have online by the end of summer.  She has been actively engaged in indexing our projects, and has become an integral part of the research process of fine tuning the OHMS system and its workflows.

More information about the summer program can be found here:  http://www.uky.edu/UGResearch/bucks_for_brains.html