Oral History Archive

A WordPress plugin for interviews, not episodes. Each record is a finding-aid entry: narrator, interviewer, accession number, timed tape log, and a consent status that can withhold the recording while still listing that the conversation exists.

Podcast plugins assume the audio is the product. This one assumes the opposite: the catalog is public, the tape is a privilege the narrator can refuse.

What you get

• Interview post type with collections and topics
• Rights: open for listening, restricted (catalog only), or embargoed until a date
• Tape log parser (00:00:12 Narrator: …) stored as timed cues
• Reading-room frontend: finding aid table, restriction stamps, synced transcript player
• Citation block in oral-history form
• Clip shortcode for quoting a time range: [oha_clip accession="OH-2019-014" start="12" end="48"]

Restricted interviews never print the audio URL in public HTML.

Install on an existing WordPress site

cd wp-content/plugins
git clone https://github.com/doodersrage/oral-history-archive.git

That creates wp-content/plugins/oral-history-archive/ with the main plugin file at the top level. Then activate Oral History Archive.

Or build/upload a release zip:

./scripts/build-release.sh
# → dist/oral-history-archive-*.zip

Then activate Oral History Archive.

Activation creates a Reading room page. It does not change your site front page. Optionally set that page under Settings → Reading, or visit /interviews/.

scripts/ and tests/ are local-demo tooling. Leave them for development; omit them when building the WordPress.org zip (see .distignore). Plugin Check on a full git checkout will flag those files — that is expected.

WordPress.org directory assets live in .wordpress-org/.

Tape log format

00:00:00 Interviewer: Today is March 18, 2019.
00:00:12 Maria Chen: I still open the gate at three thirty.
01:02:03 Interviewer: What changed?

Hours are optional. Lines that do not match are ignored. # starts a comment.

Local demo (no MySQL)

Requires PHP 8+, the SQLite PDO extension, espeak-ng, and ffmpeg (only for synthesizing the sample tapes).

./scripts/bootstrap-wp.sh
./scripts/start-server.sh

• Catalog: http://127.0.0.1:47261/
• wp-admin: http://127.0.0.1:47261/wp-admin/
• User: archivist / reading-room

The demo seeds four records from a fictional East Bay labor archive: two open for listening, one sealed during the narrator’s lifetime, one embargoed until 2028. The voices are synthesized stand-ins so the player and tape log can be tested without depositing real interviews.

php tests/test-transcript.php

Rights model

That is the difference from a podcast: a sealed interview is still part of the archive.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later