>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> So, great. So, at this point, I'm very pleased to be able to introduce Monica Mohindra. Monica is head of program coordination and communications for the Veteran's History Project at the Library of Congress, which I believe is actually celebrating its 15th anniversary today. In the ten years that Monica's been with the project, she's been proud to serve as the primary liaison responsible for coordinating a range of collaborative efforts involving such projects and organizations as the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, Princess Cruises, PBS, Ken Burns Florentine Films, The History Channel, and the Department of Veteran Affairs. So, without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Monica, and, Monica, thank you for being here and take it away. >> Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm very happy to be here, and, Michael, you stole my thunder. Yes. This is our 15th anniversary today, and we're, it couldn't be a better moment than to be here with you and we appreciate the opportunity. I'm going to get started with the slides, and, so, what I want to do is just kind of outline what the plan is for my time with you and assure you that there's plenty, going to be plenty of time for questions at the end, and I'll do any best to answer questions as they come up. I see some familiar names participating, and, so, I hope some of those folks will chime in with specifics because I know they've participated with the project for a long time. Like I see Byron Haldeman [phonetic]. Hello. So, today, I'm going to start with a brief introduction to the project itself with the assumption that most of you aren't super familiar with the background of the project. And then I'll go into two major ways of how the project can be used in a classroom setting. The first will be accessing and using existing collections through a variety of means and with the resources that my colleagues in, at outreach have created as well as some that we've developed within the project for use in the classroom, and then the second way is working with your students to actually create primary source collections through the Veteran's History Project. So, I'll go into the specifics of both of those. And I'll start with sort of how to get into the existing collections because there's lots of different ways to do that and lots of curated sections, and then as I said, there will be time at the end for questions. So, a little bit about the background about the project. As Michael said and as I said, this is our 15th anniversary today. It was signed unanimously into law by both Houses of Congress and by the time President Bill Clinton on this day in 2000, and the idea was to get individuals around the country to interview the veterans in their lives, in their communities, and voluntarily submit those interviews to the Veteran's History Project. So, that's the basis. It was actually originally the Veteran's Oral History Project but quickly realized the need to incorporate opportunities for other primary sources that spoke to the first person narrative of veteran's experience to be more inclusive. At the time, the focus was on going after the more senior veterans first, so, at the time World War I. And at the time, we weren't yet engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, the idea was how to make sure that we can get those more senior compelling first person narratives before they were lost and before the generations who have that one-on-one experience were not able to share them with us. So, it expanded to include collections of original photographs, letters, documents that also share that first person narrative, and, so, that's really what makes the collection so rich. We're approaching, with insight, is that important milestone of a hundred thousand veterans were very excited about that, but it's a double edged sword because every veteran's story is important. So, there's nothing more important about those first 100,000 or about the next 100,000. It's just nice to recognize that we have reached a reference point, a milestone, that indicates a level of inclusivity of the collections. What you see here is our homepage and is a great thing to keep returning to. Just to point out a few things because I know it's not always the easiest to decipher right away. Our 15 minute video is available up in the right hand corner, and I definitely recommend that as a great way to just kind of get started on how to create the collections. And then we're going to be talking about ways to access existing collections. So, the first thing I'd like to point out is our blog which is something we're increasingly using as a place to help share curated collections appropriate for broad audiences. You'll see here the latest example. We have two of our staff, one a reference specialist and another a liaison specialist, who are working to really dig deep and find elements in the collections that will be relevant to people across all different kinds of audiences, whether we're talking just the casual observer or students. The topics are as universal as we did a whole series with several of our staff investigating different collections last winter along with theme of missing home and being home for the holidays. And, so, you can dig into the archive of the blog and find those, or as specific to military experience, but as accessible and relatable as a few stories that talked about, you know, what was that one food element that sort of gave you comfort in the midst of all the conflict. And one of the things that we have found that seemed to be the kind of elemental experience was peaches. So, you have a really broad way of engaging with the collections but finding very specific ones. I'm going to jump back just really quick to show you exactly where you can find that blog. There is an orange button VHP blog down in the bottom left hand corner, and then that brings you to this page. If you scroll down on this page, what you'll find when you're on the live website, not on this slide, what you'll find is a section of tags, and if you want to get to all 67 of the currently curated sort of blogs, what you'll get, what you'll find is the Veteran's History Project tag; and that'll get you to a page with all of the different topics that we've covered to this point. We do answer questions pretty quickly. It's a great way to -- yes, Dinah. I'll answer your question in just a second. The comments in the blog are a great way to interact and get questions answered right away, but there are also a place we're typically asking for participation. You know, if there's a particular theme or topic that you'd like to see explored on the blog. That's a great place to have that featured and paid attention to or have your students go ahead and interact directly there. So, back to the homepage one more time so that I can show that URL. As Dinah asks for, it's www.loc.gov/vets, as in V-E-T-S. Thanks, Wally. Can everyone see this? On this side? Great. Yeah. That's exactly it. That's the URL. Thank you. Fantastic. Thanks for the question and thanks for the help getting the answer out. So, the other place, and here, I'm going to jump around a little bit. I hope I'm not giving you, your eyes whiplash. So, the other place that we find collections and curated collections, if you look in the center, right now we have a collection up called, this is always our experiencing war section is always where we have our online exhibits. The current one is end of World War II, the 70th anniversary. If you were to click on that on the live page, what you would find is this wonderful display with the collections that have been curated to express that theme, and what's nice about this is that we work really hard to show the diversity of our content. It's particularly nice for situations where you're having students try and come at the topics from a few different angles. And when we talk about diversity, we're really talking about not just ethnic and racial and background diversity, but from all across the country, from branch of service, from conflict, from every kind of way you can slice it, even faith backgrounds. So, we really try to focus that both for our efforts in trying to accrue collections but also specifically in trying to highlight collections and bring them to the forefront for use. So, on this page, what you'll want to do when you get there is scroll again to the bottom of it, and what you'll find when you do that is a section entitled "Stories by Theme"; and you'll get to all of our experiencing war releases listed by theme. I'm proud to say we're at 50 now and 51 will be released next week in commemoration of that 15th anniversary. So, here is a really great easy break down of existing topics to explore. Obviously, I shouldn't have favorites, but I do. Some include chaplains on a divine mission. We're really excited about our efforts which began about four years ago, five years ago, to try and capture the stories of chaplains of all different faith backgrounds because we discovered that was a sort of underrepresented population in our collections in terms of exploring that type of service within the veteran experience. And some of the others that are really fun are stories from the stacks, staff picks, but also, you can find ones that have curricular ties or personal interests ties and hopefully share a slightly different slice of specifically the human experience. Our goal really is to look at this from the perspective of the human experience as opposed to, you know, tell us the narrative of a particular combat. We're looking for the personal narrative in each veteran's story. So, again, to get to this next page I'm going to show you. Go back to the homepage. I'm not going to whip through that now, but that, you would go back to the homepage to get to how to participate. And the reason I want to point this out just quickly, I'll come back to this topic in greater depth, but this is an area that we have specifically for helping students and educators in creating the primary source of the Veteran's History Project collections. And I'm going to make a real distinction here. We're not just talking about oral histories, particularly now with the ages of World War II veterans that we're working with, you know, octogenarians, nonagenarians, and also with the predominance of World War I as a topic. What we're finding is that people are looking for what to do with the collections of photographs and letters and documents that they're finding in their closets and their attics and their garages that will need a place to go, and this is a really great way, also, to engage students in creating a primary source collection. And I'll get a little bit more into that, but I wanted you to know that this page exists for your benefit and for theirs. Thanks, Kathleen. What about artistic expressions as well as stories? Yes. In fact, we're about to have an onsite exhibit, a temporary exhibit here in the coming weeks, about portraits that were taken during war. We also accept elements of poetry, that sort of thing, as long as it is that first person descriptive narrative of the veteran and conducted from that perspective. If you're looking, Kathleen, specifically for some great ones, Joseph Farris who unfortunately I just learned passed away this year. Farris, F-A-R-R-I-S, has a great collection, so does Mimi Lester and there are several others. I can certainly send you more information about artistic expressions in the existing stories on a later date or offline. So, when we're talking about ways to -- oh, dear. Oh. These slides are not loading. Oh, dear. Okay. Well, I will describe this slide, and you will help me with your prodigious imaginations. This is a primary source analysis tool that my colleagues in educational outreach have available through their website, and we'll make sure that you get this URL also. I wanted to point it out because what it does is it enables to you to choose oral history specifically, and then there are several guiding questions. You can use it with your students. You can use it for yourself. You can hand it directly to them. There are three sections. So, observation, reflection, and questions, and in each section, there's a pull down menu. You can either have them do it themselves or you can use the pull down menu with selected prompts to help them get through. And what I particularly like about it, and I think is useful when trying to pair our resources with the tools that they've provided, is that you can do further investigation with these primary sources in the Veteran's History Project by choosing oral history or documents. There's different ways to do it. And it really points out to me the easy ways you can use primary sources to engage students and develop critical thinking skills. A big part for us about why world history is important and why specifically thinking about oral history as important as a primary resource is the authentic voice verses the, quote unquote, "authoritative voice". And from our purposes, as I mentioned, that we work really hard to have the diversity -- thank you, Michael -- to have the diversity expressed. We really feel it also helps give a real democratized voice. You can have students specifically look for veterans from their particular area of the country, from their particular background, and, so, you're getting that authentic perspective to investigate a topic further; but you're able to refine the lens to something that may be extremely approachable to your students. The next slide, it was an example of a letter that was being used by students that they described their reaction to in this slide. It's a wonderful primary source of a letter that goes on and on in a prose that's just a gorgeous 1944 prose. Bear with my sick cold infected voice. I'll read just a few lines so you get a sense of it. "My darling Jamie, hope this gets out to you. It will be the last note from me for a long time. Don't worry, angel. I'll get in touch with you first chance I get. Believe me, darling, I'm feeling wonderfully well and absolutely squared away for anything that can come my way." And I think what's so wonderful about these documents and the opportunity to see them in their handwriting and in their entirety for the students is it really personalizes the experience that lets them see beyond their, it lets them expand past their presumptions as you can see as they're reflecting here in these student blog pieces. The other thing that's really wonderful about it, and not necessarily reflected in this blog, but I think is easy to incorporate in a classroom setting is the opportunity to think about, in this particular case, is this incredibly, it's a love note that's going on and on in this gorgeous handwriting, and the questions that arise immediately are what does this veteran talk about? What doesn't he talk about? And why? This happens to be a letter that doesn't have anything redacted. And, so, I know that that was a big issue to be talking about, for lots of veterans, they wanted to make sure that when their letters arrived home, they were visually an expression of, you know, them thinking about their families and they didn't want all the black lines all across their letters for their redaction. So, that sends you in a couple different directions and gives lots of opportunity for the students for personal impact. We, just another quick example, we had a group of students in, oh, probably about five or six years ago, and we always, when students come in to present collections, we talked to them about the experience, what it was like for them. We try and hear what they're reflections are having created the primary source. So, I do my best to put a few of them on the spot, especially when they're high school students. That's pretty fun. And they always come up with these really fantastic answers. One thing that has always struck out to me is this one student's answer which was, that she was so excited to do this project after, she was trepidatious at first but excited to do this project with her father because he had served in the Persian Gulf War. And, you know, at the time, we were deeply involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she said, "You know, I didn't even know that the Persian Gulf War existed. I hadn't heard the term until I did this project with my dad." And it just really struck me at the time. I couldn't believe she hadn't even heard of the term. So, I went and I looked at the textbook that she was used that apparently at the time, lots of social studies teachers were using around the country, and there was literally one paragraph about the Persian Gulf War. And, so, this opportunity gave her a chance not only to know her father better, but to understand the connections between all the conflicts and our shared history as a result, an opportunity to dig deeper, which she did. She then went on to look at other collections out of personal interest about the Persian Gulf in our collections and apparently found it quite gratifying. The other things that we've seen teachers do really successfully to capture and expand on student reflections include creating Wiki's with them. As you see here, blogs. One really creative exercise that I saw was the students actually wrote letters to the veterans or the family members of the collections that they were viewing. They didn't know them. They hadn't created the interviews themselves. They were simply write heartfelt letters about their experience back to the veterans, and having it be targeted towards them, I think really illuminated a human connection you might not otherwise see. Just another point on that. Once a student does, I just gave the example of the student who went and looked at other Persian Gulf collections, once a student or a classroom or a project is targeted around a specific kind of collection or a specific kind of experience, it's also really cool to have them have the opportunity to go back through the digitized collections and look for others from the veterans who maybe served from a similar battle or in the same unit or from the same town or background. What I like about that and what I take every opportunity to do to share with students is to talk a little bit about that work is very similar to what we see happen with researchers every week here in our collections. So, going back in and looking for corroborating or validating other stories that relate to the one that they've experienced is exactly what researchers like. That everyone from folks from the DPMO who are looking to find POW/MIAs and using our collections to help identify ways to do that to people looking to make PBS or HBO sets more authentic by having better images on the walls to authors of fiction or nonfiction. That's the kind of work those people are doing, and, so, these students are engaged in that similar work. It's always really exciting to share that with them, especially when they are able to come to the building, but also just when they can see it for themselves online. Our colleagues in, at outreach have also created with us a couple of curated primary source sets with attendant tools to help make them a little easier to use in the classroom. The nice thing about these is that they have been specifically selected to not be offensive for a wide variety of ages. It's a great way participation for the project is really limited to tenth grade and above, but use of the project, we're really trying to make it as broadly accessible as possible. What you see here is the teacher page from which you can get to the primary source sets. Which are here, and what you'll see on these is the veteran's stories, the Veteran's History Project, and veteran's story struggles for participation. Both primary source that have several specific collections, and then there are tools; how to put those straight into a classroom setting. Here's an example of what that looks like. So, you see that there are analysis tools and guides and a PDF and you get a really broad range of different kinds of experiences. One of the tools that's available is analyzing oral histories, and it's something, this is also where you get that analysis tool that I had mentioned earlier. And this is really great. All of these resources are shared so far are really helpful for taking what's existing and using it in a variety of classroom settings. But the other way to participate with our collections is actually to generate the primary source, is actually to create an interview or to pull together a collection of original materials. And one of the fantastic benefits of that is having the students work together in teams or individually with a veteran, each to bring a story to the surface and give it life. There's something extremely empowering about that experience, both for the students and for the veterans. They co-create something which lasts for posterity is saved for history at the Library of Congress, and there's something about creating that primary source and having it preserved at the Library of Congress that is super validating for both people or the team of people engaged in that effort, to know that that collection is resident in the place, you know, with the baseball cards from the Negro leagues, if that's important to you, or to presidential personal papers. To have it be taken that seriously and have it count towards the larger picture is, I know that that's fuzzy curriculum, but we see that it makes broad impacts for more specific curriculum goals and objectives. Somebody mentioned earlier, I think it was Kathleen, about creative works in the existing collections, but the other aspect of this is that not only does creating this primary source, if you engage your students with the actual collections in terms of creating it, not only is there the opportunity for getting them to help pull those together and talking about how those artistic works can be part of the larger story of a personal narrative, but one thing that we're seeing more and more of is classroom projects that take the existing oral history and turn it into something else. A starting off point for creating works themselves. There have been a couple of fantastic examples of that. In just a minute I'm going to play this clip, but I want to give a few examples so that you have a sense of what I'm talking about. Several years ago, there was a group of students working on the Philadelphia Student Mural Project, and they had previously done some murals with some veterans and there was an effort to specifically do a mural with Tuskegee Airmen. And we got connected to them through a variety of different sources and were able to provide for them a workshop. And what they did was they did, targeted oral histories with Tuskegee Airmen, and then did the mural, and about the airmen's experience. And what we heard from all participants from all sides, including the artists, the teaching artists that helped them create the mural, was that it was a much more engaged in-depth. And every step of the process, it was essentially a better product, whether you were looking at it from an artistic standard or from meeting curricular objectives or from connecting people in communities that it, by using the oral history process through the Veteran's History Project as a vehicle for deriving greater meaning, they were able to far exceed their expectations for what they were trying to accomplish artistically. And it's just really cool to hear all about that. This is another great example, and we're going to try our best to play it for you, is this three minute clip of one of two of the honorable mention videos that were awarded honorable mentions in the White House Film Festival this past year who showcased the student works showcasing their VHP activity. So, it's a great example not of how students can turn this into something else, but what the impact is for the students and for the community. So, bear with me. I'm going to try and play this. >> Dear students, thank you for your kindness to Ed. Thank you for the grand Veteran's Day card that you sent him. I'm looking at it right now. I've placed it with Ed's high school graduation picture. The flag that was on his coffin in a photo of him in the service. Thank you for letting Ed be a part of the Veteran's History Project at the Library of Congress. Ed enjoyed so very much when he would meet and speak with you young people. It was an honor for him. Ed passed away on December 20th, 2012. He had a rough year health-wise, but the best occasions he attended were those involving young people. Very truly yours, Adele S. Fabish. >> I admire this boy because he's got his future to look forward to. >> Hi. My name's Ty. I'm part of the Harlem Veteran Project. I currently have a question on what type of aircraft were on his carrier during World War II. So, I'm going to be heading over to his place, see if he can identify some of the aircraft I'm going to print out for him. >> Mr. Terreberry, what does it mean to you knowing that Ty's working on it, knowing that he hopes to get into the Navy, or is heading down into the Navy? >> I admire Ty for what he's doing. >> I honestly think I don't deserve some of the things that he just said. It's, I just feel like that I'm just a regular high school student that has so many big aspirations. >> No, you're not. >> And -- >> No, you're not. No, you're not. You're an exceptionally young man with a future, and we need more people, more people like you. >> The Crabb family. I worked on Mr. Crabb's documentary last year, and unfortunately, he passed away around three weeks ago. In lieu of flowers or any other sort of donations to the family, they decided to donate it to the project. So, I'm going right now to personally thank them not only for that, but for all of the other contributions in my life. >> These are his shirts. >> He wore black jeans and flannel shirts -- >> Every day of his life. >> Every day of his life. >> So, we thought it'd be good. >> I think for any student going through this project, there are certain life lessons that you don't get out of a book. >> Both of my grandparents have been a huge part of my kid's lives, and my daughter is only four years old and my son is two. So, the memories that they have with him will fade over time. At his visitation, to hear his voice playing in the background just showed me that he's just still here with all of us. >> Dear veterans, I write this letter in hopes that someone somewhere will hear this call. Students from Harlem High School will continue to hear and record your stories. For one of the greatest accomplishments a high school student can have is documenting our hero's history. Lastly, know that as long as you bravely serve our nation, we will always be listening. Yours truly, Michael Fenters. [ Music ] >> Thanks for bearing with me, everyone. I hope that you feel as I do that it was worth it. I just think that's a really great example of the students really pouring their personal energy into this effort. That particular program is both happening in the classroom an as an extracurricular, which is a model we've seen in lots of classrooms across the country. Either examples include schools where they're doing it almost like a yearbook model. I'm so glad you enjoyed it. It's nice to see the feedback. Thanks, Cindy and Christina. They're doing models very similar to that where there's a portion of it that happens in a classroom setting and then it's an afterschool club, almost like a yearbook would be where they produce a coffee table book that then goes out to the entire community. I've seen other examples where they do it similar to a big read where, at the end, everyone gets an opportunity to select a vignette, and then they create a documentary that the whole community watches through a series of events. Somebody earlier talked about teachers looking for ways to connect students with curriculum and build the skill sets needed for real world tasks. What we're seeing with these kinds of outputs is the ability to take advantage of using authentic material primary sources to engage with them on exactly that, on these kinds of rural tasks. So, one of the things that we wanted to be able to -- oh, yeah. It is similar to the Paper Clips Project. That's true. One of the things that we just were able to produce with the Oral History Association is they, in their wonderful way, call it a pamphlet which I just love because it's 95 pages long, but there is, and you can get this for $15 on Amazon and on Barnes and Noble. It's called "Doing Veterans Oral History". But there is an entire chapter, about 30 pages, devoted to educators and to students, if you want something a little bit more than what we have available through our field kit on our website and our 15 minute video. This gives you the opportunity to go through it or hand it to your students with that scholarly or academic lens of the best practices of oral history. That section that's geared just towards educators, I'm able to provide for you as a text PDF for free. You don't have to purchase the whole book, but if you're interested in the whole book, it is really nice. And like I said, you can purchase that on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or if you would like, you can get it from us, just the educator's portion, and we'll be offering that in a few different packages in a coming year. But that's something I can offer to you for participating in this now. And, again, it's a student resource, in a way, to add on to the existing resources we have on our website. Just wanted to point that out to you. You can also find that information about it on Oral History Association's website. The other thing that we have started this year through a generous gift from Bill and Buffy Cafritz's Family Foundation is a campaign specifically aimed at recording the stories of World War II veterans from the Washington Metropolitan area. Bill Cafritz passed away last year, and he had served in World War II and had been awarded a Purple Heart; but it turned out that very few people in his life actually knew about that because he didn't talk about it. And, so, it was just sort of a wonderful cinergy of things come together for making sure that DC World War II veterans understood we wanted them to be part of this historic milestone of the first 100,000. Get your stories in there before you're not part of that first milestone. The reason I'm sharing it here is because we're hoping to turn this into a template that other communities could use, and we'll have elements of it available for people to customize. So, in a situation like the Harlem Veteran's History Project, it might make a lot of sense for them to sort of plug and play and use some of the tools that we're creating around this. So, I just kind of wanted to bring that to your attention. We're also finding that the whole notion of our history's future is in your hands is something that's really resonating with high school students who have seen this campaign and images from this campaign. So, I think I'm right in time to leave plenty of time for questions. So, please, fire away. >> Okay. Monica, I've also received a couple questions separately. So, I'll ask you the first couple while other people ask their questions. You ready? So, first question is: Are there particular resources from the Veteran's History Project that appear to be, you know, more proper downloads by teachers? Are you able to see any patterns there? >> That's a great question. I think historically across the board, World War II has been something that folks are really gravitating towards, but in the past couple of years, we've seen a real shift towards Vietnam. We're actually the centerpiece of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation Curriculum Guide. They offer lots of tools in general for teaching Vietnam, and we're used as, what I believe to be really essential, enriching part of that. So, I know that that's a broad brush stroke, but that's what we've seen so far. >> Awesome. And that is Christina also has a question. She asks: Can you walk us through teachers/students, what they would actually submit interviews and other primary sources? In other words, how would they go about sort of participating in the process? >> Absolutely. It's the "how to participate" page that I showed you on that 15 minute video as well as our field kit are really essential in doing that, and you can find all of those through the homepage. But the process is pretty straightforward. If you're going to do an interview, you simply use the required forms. You set up the conversation with the veteran, and you record an interview. One interview per recordable media, 30 minutes or longer. And with all the forms packaged together, each recording with each set of forms, and you submit them to the Library of Congress. I'm going to keep it broad there because those resources are wildly accessible off the homepage. But, Christina, if you have any specific questions beyond that, I'd be happy to answer them. I see that Cindy Witch asks: Are the collections growing, and do you find the veterans are willing to share their personal items? Really great question, Cindy. The collections are growing. We get about 100 collections per week on average. More when you might expect teachers to be sending us troves of them. Unless when there's lulls in schedules, but on average, about 100 per week. And veterans are willing to share their personal items, especially when they know they're coming to the Library of Congress. It can be daunting to face the whole original question. You know, why do they need our originals, but, you know, there are floods, fires, I mean, I hate to go to the super dramatic right away, but there are lots of reasons that we're in the business of protecting originals. And what we've been finding is that families actually really appreciate the opportunity to know that the originals are here and being used for research purposes. Sorry. I just want to try and read through the questions. [inaudible] Go for it. >> I'm sorry. I had one more question for you. I'm getting some questions separately. This is more of a personal one which is: How did you get involved with Veteran's History Project? What is your kind of connection to this project? >> Man, I hated answering that question. I'm involved in the project, really, I stumbled into it. My work here started with a small project aimed at illuminating the collections of the Library of Congress for K through 12 audiences, and they needed someone to help do that specifically with the Veteran's History Project as it was growing in 2005. And, so, I was moved over to work on that and then never left. My husband is a veteran. His family members are veterans. My background, I am half Indian. I was born in India, and I don't have a connection sort of through my family of origin, but my adopted family for sure. And just got really engaged with the whole notion of why oral history is important and how it connects people to the real sources of information and how it is magically gives voice to every perspective, validating every perspective. So, I'll leave it there. >> That's great. Linda also asks a question. Can family members access recordings and other artifacts after they are submitted, and if so, how long a turnaround would they expect before they would be available? >> After long work days in the middle of the week, I'm so impressed with these questions. It's really great. Yes. Family members can access the recordings. Anyone can access them. About over 15,000 of our over 98,000 collections are available digitized online. For the rest of those collections that we haven't yet been able to digitize, and that will be a long process. I'm certainly not promising that all of them will be digitized, but family members can come here to the Library of Congress and they can view them. In fact, we have a couple of families that do that on an annual basis to celebrate birthdays, they come, and sometimes they continue to contribute to a collection as they find more letters or more photographs and they turn that into an event, which is really a lovely thing to see. The turnaround for processing a collection that is sent in, and I'll just put in a plug here not to send collections via the USPS. We can't take collections through the postal service because they get fried by the specific screening process, but collections that are sent here typically get processed within four to six weeks for acknowledgment of receipt and then between four and six months for actually being able to come and see it and do research, essentially, or to use the collection. If a large family, you know, more than two or three people is going to come, which we do have happen, the appointment is made in our information center, or if it's for more of a research use, the appointment is made with our reference specialist for the American Folk Life Center reading room. And that's where they get served the collection. And as I mentioned before, researchers use these collections every week. We're serving them to serious researchers and family members alike in the American Folk Life Center reading room and also in the Veteran's History Project information center. >> Okay. We probably have time for one more question before we wrap up, and I've got another one for you, Monica. In terms of teacher use, you know, the question about access raising, you know, copyright issues, are all these resources that you find online? Are these, you know, generally free for teachers to use and, or do they have to worry about copyrighting issues? >> Copyright is not an issue for teachers to use. The veterans and the interviewers actually retain copyright based on our release forms. However, our release forms are specific to us sharing the collections for educational purposes. So, if you're going to, you know, turn it into the latest blockbuster HBO script, it's incumbent upon you to go ahead and get if copyright. We don't adjudicate that, but it is up to you to make that happen. But for teachers, there are no copyright problems, and teachers all across the country use the collections all the time. >> Monica, that's great. We're just about bumping up on ten minutes till. Do you have any final words for us, or do you want, should we just wrap it up? >> Actually, I would say just one point to consider when you're looking at this collection when you're thinking about the Veteran's History Project is that 60, according to a peer research survey, 62 percent of the American public is immediately related to a veteran. That's, and they define that as spouse, parent, sibling, or child. That doesn't include grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins. And, so, if that's the number for 62 percent, if you expand that to that level of family or to how we make our families today, I think we get lost in the numbers about the 1 percent that serve. That may be true for the current conflict, but when you think about the divide and the gap between the veterans and the veteran population and the general population, that divides actually much smaller. So, I just implore you to think about, as we're headed into Veteran's Day, as we're headed into the holidays, think about the veteran in your life, think about the veteran in your community. This is something you can do with your students. This is also something you can do to enrich your personal experience, and I hereby deputize all of you as ambassadors of the project. Thanks so much for your time today. >> Monica, thank you so much. I can see all these thank you's pouring in the chat. Add my thank you to that. It was a wonderful session. Very informative and very moving as well. For everybody on the call, thank you for joining us. If you look up at the screen, there are some final information for you. We'd love to have your feedback on these sessions. So, there's a link there. You can click right on that link and take a quick survey for us. The feedback really helps us to just kind of get better and serve you teachers, serve you as teachers. Also, for those wanting a certificate, you are eligible to get a certificate for one instructional hour for this session. You will receive an e-mail within five business days with directions to access that certificate. Finally, as we've mentioned several times, this session was recorded, so you can go back and watch it again. You will see it online. Please tell your colleagues, your family members, to go on and watch it as well because, you know, we can sort of spread the world beyond this particular group. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.