Stories Matter

Stories Matter is a new oral History DataBase Tool built for oral historians by oral historians, as an alternative to transcription. This free, open source software allows for the archiving of digital video and audio materials, enabling oral historians to Annotate, analyze, and evaluate materials in their collections.

In its present form, Stories Matter is intended to allow oral historians and other interested communities to interact with audio and video recordings of interviews in a way that emphasizes individual interviewees as central to stories being narrated. In addition to interacting with whole sessions, users will be able to Create clips according to personal criteria, and then create personalized playlists of clips that speak to specific themes. A convenient search tool allows users to locate clips, sessions, interviews, and projects that speak to their particular interests. Users can export the results of their work in several different formats for easy use in presentations, and website design. Finally, a new feature of Stories Matter, Phase II is online functionality, which allows multiple users to collaborate on building a single database according to their assigned user roles.