How to use this site

The website can be thought of as having two principle perspectives

The interviews; this is the heart of our project. The life narrative approach enables each complex, individual story to be told, as remembered by the interviewee, in his or her own voice. We have tried as far as possible to present a broad spectrum of individuals, men and women, from various parts of the country and from various kinds of backgrounds. You can listen to all or part of these interviews using various ways of searching them, or you can view a short summary of each interview.
In order to provide some background context to the individual stories, we have also provided some information about the 1950s, the decade on which most of these memories are focused. The main themes identified are the demographic crisis in Ireland in the 1950s (due to continuing high emigration), challenges to traditional ways of life in Ireland and modernisation.

You can use this site to access text, images and sound. There are several different ways of searching and retrieving this material and we have done our best to make them as user-friendly as possible.

Listening to the oral archives

The use of sound on the Internet is not new. Many thousands of internet websites, including those of most major broadcasting organisations, enable you to log on and listen to their material. For example, Irish national broadcaster RTÉ carries extensive sound (and even video) material on its website http://www.rte.ie. This means that you can listen to programmes live on the Internet, or programmes which have already been broadcast and which have been archived on the site.

The technology used is called streaming audio. Sound files are data files like any other computer files, but they are very large. If you had to download the entire file before you could listen to it, from a home computer with an ordinary modem, this would take a very long time. However, with streaming audio, you can click on the link and the sound will start playing, or 'streaming' almost immediately.

What do you need in order to listen?

You will need (a) a sound card in your computer - a piece of hardware which enables the sound to be processed (b) loudspeakers connected to, or part of, your computer (c) proprietary software, called RealOne Player, made by the RealAudio company, to enable the sound to be received.

Most computers nowadays, especially home computers, already come equipped with a sound card and speakers, as many are used for home computer games and other such purposes. Some will also have RealAudio software already installed, often associated with the Internet browser (products such as Microsoft Internet Explorer of Netscape Navigator) which you use to browse the Internet.

If you do not have RealOne Player already the good news is that it is free. You will need to visit the website at http://www.real.com, click on the link for 'Free RealOne Player' and follow the instructions to download and install the software. If you have a home computer and a slow connection to the Internet it will take some time to download this product, but this only has to be done once.

Once you have installed the RealOne Player, it will automatically be used any time you click on a link to a sound file. In practice there will be a delay of some seconds while the Player is accessed and the sound stream starts to flow from our server here in Cork to your computer. After that the sound should play in a continuous stream. It can happen at times when the Internet is especially busy that occasional breaks will account, especially if you are a long way from our server, but this is becoming increasingly rare.

Searching the sound files on our website.

We have provided a number of ways for the material to be used. You can

listen to an entire interview from the beginning
search by keyword or free text (Internet Explorer 5.0 or better is required)
view a chronological summary of the interview and listen to any excerpt you choose

The main page contains a list of all of the available interviews. You can also narrow your options by selecting the drop-down menu which sorts the list by region of origin, gender, alphabetically or by emigrant status (those who left and returned and people who did not emigrate at all). You can use any of these methods to identify a particular individual in whom you may be interested, and then go to that person's page by clicking on her/his name.

Find and listen to an entire interview

Simply click on the appropriate link on the interviewee's page and the entire interview will begin streaming from the beginning. You can click the stop button on the RealOne Player at any time if you wish to stop listening. You can also search for another interview while the first one is playing; as soon as you click on it the first interview will be stopped and the second one will begin playing.

Search using freetext and/or keywords (Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or better is required).

Listening to a two hour interview may require more time than you can spare. Moreover, you may be interested in finding something more specific. Our search page enables you to do each of the following

You can search the chronological summaries (see below) of all the interviews for any word in them e.g. a placename. The search page will return any 'hits' it finds in a list which it will display on the page. You can select whichever one you wish to listen to and it will play the appropriate segment of the interview.
You may also search the chronological summaries using a list of key search terms which we have compiled (e.g. 'family', 'childhood', 'education', 'emigration' etc.). You may then select and play any segment from the list of 'hits' which the system returns.

Unfortunately internet browsers are not fully compatible and none complies entirely with a set of common standards. We have designed our search page to work with the most popular browser (recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer) and the most popular equipment (pc systems) but it will not currently work with other browsers and may not work on Apple Mac systems. In due course, and as soon as resources allow, we hope to provide these facilities for other systems. In the meantime, a test page is provided which you can use to see if your system can use the search facilities. They will work with more than 90% of systems in use.

View a chronological summary of the interview and listen to any excerpt you choose

A third method of accessing the oral material also exists. As mentioned, each interview has a short chronological summary of its content, which you can view by clicking the appropriate link on the interviewee page. Each chronological summary, or log, contains a series of embedded time tags, or links, with a short description of content of that part of the interview. Clicking on any of these links will bring you directly to that segment of the interview.

Texts and images on the site

The site contains a number of texts and images

brief text-only descriptions of each interview. These may be accessed from each interviewee's page.
texts such as poem, letters and other materials, as well as photographs and other visual material, submitted by individual interviewees. These may be accessed either from that interviewee's page, or under 'texts and images' in the section of the website 'the 1950s'. This section of the site also contains other kinds of background material such as statistical information, press cuttings, and a bibliography, designed to present further information about the 1950s.

Problems in using the site?

If you have any difficulty email us at migration@ucc.ie