World Libraries: Librarian of Congress issues call to record Veterans’ Histories

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has issued a call to action to all Americans. During the Veterans History Project’s (VHP) 10th Anniversary Commemoration Sept. 29, he launched a new campaign asking America to "collect and preserve the story of at least one veteran" and to "pledge to preserve this important part of American history." Time is of the essence, he added: "Help us gather in the accounts of 10,000 veterans by Veterans Day."

In the end 2009 The Veterans History Project offered a new video to help volunteer interviewers navigate the VHP Field Kit—a "how-to" guide on recording the first-person oral histories of American wartime veterans. This is a 15-minute video which explains the straightforward steps that volunteer interviewers can follow to record the first-person interviews of American wartime veterans and send them to the Library of Congress.

Congress created The Veterans History Project in 2000 as a national documentation program of the American Folklife Center (www.loc.gov/folklife/) to record, preserve and make accessible the firsthand remembrances of American wartime veterans from World War I through the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war. More than 68,000 individual stories comprise the collection to date. The project relies on volunteers to record veterans’ remembrances using guidelines accessible at www.loc.gov/vets/.