Skip to main content
Article
Visionaries, architects and pioneers: Conceptualising SMU
Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance Meeting 2014, December 2-4
  • Pin Pin Yeo, Singapore Management University
  • Patricia Meyer, Singapore Management University
Alternative Title
Oral History Project at SMU
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 15th 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
Publisher
PRDLA
City or Country
Macau
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Citation Information
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.