Status Line
- General Information
- Nov. 07
- Issue: 217
What’s Up on the Web?
In honor of Veterans Day, the featured web site this month is that of the Veterans History Project http://www.loc.gov/vets/. Created by an act of Congress and signed into law by President Clinton in 2000, the Veterans History Project is a program of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress that collects oral history interviews, memoirs, letters, diaries, photographs, and other original materials from U.S. veterans of World Wars I and II, and the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf wars as well as the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts (2001- present). U.S. citizen civilians who were actively involved in supporting war efforts are also included.
The materials submitted by each contributor to the project are referred to as a “collection.” The collections are accessible in person at the Library of Congress (more information at http://www.loc.gov/vets/researchinfo.html), and in addition, over 2,400 collections have been digitized for online accessibility. A catalog describing the collections is available at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/html/search/search.html and it offers searching by numerous parameters including name and gender of veteran/civilian, conflict (e.g., Vietnam War), branch of service, service location, and rank. You can also limit searches so that only those collections that have been digitized are returned in search results. Browsing by last name, by conflict and military branch, by state of residence, and by race/ethnicity is also available.
As part of its ongoing effort to obtain veterans’ stories, the Library of Congress teamed up with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and filmmaker Ken Burns at the time of the recent airing of the TV documentary series TheWar which focused on World War II. As a result of that collaboration, a special section of the Veterans History Project web site features digitized collections from the VHP archive as they relate to each episode of TheWar (see http://www.loc.gov/vets/stories/thewar/index.html). For example, to correspond with the first episode, “A Necessary War,” which covers the first year of U.S. involvement, links are provided to personal stories from the VHP archive that pertain to Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, the Bataan Death March, Guadalcanal, and the Japanese-American internment camps.
Information about participating in the Veterans History Project, either as an individual or as an organization, is available at http://www.loc.gov/vets/kit.html.
[Ann Gunning, Member Services Librarian, Nylink]