Radio Oranje: Enhanced Access to a Historical Spoken Word Collection

Abstract

Access to historical audio collections is typically very restricted: content is often only available on physical (analog) media and the metadata is usually limited to keywords, giving access at the level of relatively large fragments, e.g., an entire tape. Many spoken word heritage collections are now being digitized, which allows the introduction of more advanced search technology. This paper presents an approach that supports online access and search for recordings of historical speeches. A demonstrator has been built, based on the so-called Radio Oranje collection, which contains radio speeches by the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina that were broadcast during World War II. The audio has been aligned with its original 1940s manual transcriptions to create a time-stamped index that enables the speeches to be searched at the word level. Results are presented together with related photos from an external database.