Converting Legacy OHMS

The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries created a web-based system called OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) to inexpensively and efficiently enhance access to oral history online. Learn more about OHMS.

Legacy OHMS XML files may be converted to AVAnnotate projects using the following method.

To produce an AVAnnotate project from an OHMS item:

1) Locate the OHMS XML file for the audio item.

Some OHMS-XML files contain header information with item-level data, which can be challenging for commercial converters to handle. This must be removed before conversion, or the converter is likely to produce a single-row spreadsheet that is unusable for AVAnnotate.

2) Use a text editor to delete the following elements from the file:

a) All elements between the opening record tag and the index tag. This may include version, date, series_id, and others.

b) vtt_transcript at the bottom of the file.

Convert the XML file to a CSV File

3) Go to: https://www.convertcsv.com/xml-to-csv.htm

4) Upload the OHMS XML file into the Step 1 field.

6) Skip Step 2.

7) In Step 3, “Generate output, “ choose “XML to Excel.” This will automatically generate an Excel file for download.

Process the spreadsheet

8) Update keyword delimiters If there are keywords in the OHMS file, open the file in Excel, search and replace semicolons (;) with pipes (|) within the “keywords” column, and save. The same may be necessary if using the Subjects field.

9) AVAnnotate requires start and end times for annotations, but many OHMS projects only annotate a point in time. A point in time can be replicated in AVAnnotate: add a new end_time column to the spreadsheet and copy the OHMS start times to this colummn.

Add the spreadsheet to AVAnnotate

10) After creating a new Project and Event in AVAnnotate, upload the edited OHMS spreadsheet as an Annotation set. Each type of data coming from OHMS will require a separate annotation set – one for each of OHMS’ “keywords” and “subjects” from the columns in the OHMS spreadsheet. Typically, partial transcript, synopsis, and title make suitable columns to convert into annotation sets. Typical OHMS files use both keywords and subjects. The keywords tend to be more similar to AVAnnotate tags. It is recommended to import that column as tags each time the OHMS spreadsheet is imported.

For example, upload an annotation set using the “title” information as the annotation body and “keywords” as the tags. Upload a second annotation set using only the “partial transcription” as the annotation body and “keywords” as tags. Call this annotation set, “partial transcript.” Upload a third annotation set using the “synopsis” as the annotation body and use the “keywords” as tags into an annotation set called “synopsis”.