Visionaries, architects and pioneers: Conceptualising SMU

Alternative Title

Oral History Project at SMU

Author

Pin Pin Yeo, Singapore Management UniversityFollow
Patricia Meyer, Singapore Management University

Publication Type

Presentation

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

12-2014

Abstract

The Singapore Management University (SMU) Library was tasked with documenting the early history of SMU by the chairman of its board of trustees. An oral history project to interview the pioneers involved in the formation of the university began in 2011. The project team included the Library, the Information Technology department, and a researcher/interviewer who was familiar with SMU. It was a steep learning curve for the team. As they conducted and processed the interviews, they learned about and made decisions on interviewing, recording, transcribing, storage, website design, discoverability, usability, and sustainability. The resulting oral history website presents the interviews with in an interactive way, together with a timeline of SMU’s milestones. Public users listen or read selections from the interviews. In some cases videos are available. Transcripts of the interviews are available in SMU’s institutional repository, InK, to ensure that the contents are discoverable by search engines through use of appropriate metadata. The oral history recordings contributed to the research for a scholarly book about SMU and higher education in Singapore, commissioned to coincide with SMU’s 15^th anniversary in 2015. As we move forward, the Library is organising new interviews with people and groups who have made significant contributions to SMU’s history. The oral history site is at http://oralhistory.smu.edu.sg/ and InK is at http://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/

Keywords

Singapore Management University, oral history, interviews, pioneers, start-up team, university, higher education history, Singapore

Discipline

Asian Studies | Higher Education | Library and Information Science

Publication

Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance Meeting 2014, December 2-4

First Page

1

Last Page

21

Publisher

PRDLA

City or Country

Macau

Embargo Period

1-1-1970

Citation

Yeo, Pin Pin and Patricia Meyer. 2014. Visionaries, architects and pioneers: Conceptualising SMU. Presentation at Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance Meeting 2014, December 2-4, Macau.

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.