Lessons learnt during the establishment of an Oral History Channel on how to make oral histories more accessible

The purpose of this paper is to share recent developments and practices implemented by the KwaZulu-Natal Archives and Records Service in South Africa in order to discover inventive new approaches for making Oral History interviews available to a wider audience. With assistance from AVP in the United States, the KwaZulu-Natal Archives and Records Service has launched an Oral History Channel to increase access to oral interviews from its archive. As technology evolve, the KwaZulu-Natal Oral History unit is exploring new approaches to aid researchers and the general public in gaining access to their decade-long oral collection. In South Africa, publishing interviews on a dedicated Oral History platform has been relatively unheard of, and the KwaZulu-Natal Archives had to overcome certain particular obstacles in order to create a holistic system that would improve oral history access for South African audiences. Language, metadata, interactive access, and publishing were some of the most problematic areas in building a successful system. This short presentation will overview some of the unique solutions that was applied to the challenge in building the Oral history ecosystem.