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Louise
Corti In this paper we will present the work so far in building a freely accessible Web resource based on a collection of 500 life history interviews drawn from cross-national sample of people in Britain born before 1918 and interviewed in 1972-3. This dataset known as the `Family Life and Work Experience before 1918' has been by archived and disseminated by Qualidata, with the transcripts held at the National Social Policy and Social Change Archive at the University of Essex, and the sound recordings at the British Library National Sound Archive. The study has high usage, yet is relatively physically inaccessible as it still resides in paper and reel-to-reel format. The project involves scanning, creating bookmarked pdfs, and a web front end to a searchable database of interviews summaries and the pdfs. There are also plans to mark-up some of the text which will give a good opportunity to evaluate existing DTDs that exist for this kind of material. This may further provide ideas for enhancing the DDI to meet the needs of this type of partially structured textual data. The project is being undertaken jointly with the History Data Service at the UK Data Archive. Finally and dependent on funding, the project aims to link in audio, photos, census data and maps relating to the individuals and whole sample, and to build in exemplars for use in teaching. Louise Corti |