>> We are so thrilled that you are joining us today for our episode of online office hours. Our focus today is on the Veterans History Project, and we're glad that you're here live or if you're joining us by recording. As a reminder, these informal sessions are short. There will be a 20-minute demonstration, and the sessions are being recorded. You will have the opportunity to talk to each other and to the presenter via chat. So let's get started with using the chat. Tell us your name, where you're joining us from, and what and whom you teach. As I mentioned earlier, today's episode is on the Veterans History Project. VHP, as we call it, collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American War Veterans so that future generations may hear directly from Veterans and better understand the realities of war. Today, you'll hear more about how to get students involved with the project. Our guide today is Monica Mohindra, the Head of VHP Program Coordination and Communications. Cheryl Lederle from the Learning and Innovation Office is on the chat to answer questions and to serve you the URLs from today's speaker. So without further delay, I will hand the mic over to our presenter, Monica Mohindra. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us, whether now or recorded. I was nicely introduced by my distinguished colleague in education, Kathleen McGuigan. I'm Monica Mohindra with the Veterans History Project. And first, I just want to say a big thanks to my amazing colleagues, Kathleen and Cheryl Lederle and Danna Bell, and there's a whole team of folks that are doing amazing work to make sure that educators have some really great insights into how to manipulate, navigate, use the collections of the Library of Congress. And I'm very grateful for this opportunity to participate in that and hopefully unearth some information about the Veterans History Project for you, how you can participate, but mostly today how to delve into it and explore it to help your students with things like primary sources, information literacy. There's all different ways you can connect this to work that you may already be doing. And hopefully, we can help send you on that path a little bit today if you aren't already doing so. I typically do these kinds of things in front of people, not live screen, so we're all in this new situation. So what I'd like to do is find out from the people that I'm looking at as I'm imagining you all, how much you know about the Veterans History Project, whether this is a completely new experience for you and something you haven't heard of or whether it's something you're a little bit familiar with, and that way I can tailor how much background and history I share with you before we move forward. So if you could also use the chat box now to give me a sense, you know, is the Veterans History Project something you've heard of previously or is it a brand new idea to you? Thanks for the followup in the chat box. Much appreciated. Well, I'm going to carry forth because I have a little bit of time. And as your information comes rolling in, I will adjust accordingly and not spend too much time on just background so we can get to actually navigating. So the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress is in the midst of its 20th anniversary year. The Veterans History Project was started as a piece of unanimously signed legislation by Congress in October of 2000. And the idea was for individuals to gather the first-person remembrances and narratives of the Veterans in their lives and communities from around the country. The idea wasn't to send out a cadre of trained ethnographers and sociologists and oral historians to do it. It was really to engage individuals around the country in the process of speaking to the people in their lives and in their communities. And it came -- the genesis for this idea was really happening across the country. Lots of different people had a similar idea. If you can remember or if you're familiar with that time period back in 2000, there was a focus on World War II generation and the anniversaries such as we have this week of their different experiences. And so at the time, it was really coming together in the same kind of way. In our case, it was Representative Ron Kind had had a family picnic and had been telling the -- had been talking to his uncles who were telling their stories in this informal setting. And he looked at his young sons and realized that a lot of this was going over their heads and that if he recorded it, it would be available to them later. Back then, you may, too, have had that ubiquitous camcorder in your hall closet. And so that was retrieved, and the recording was made. And about that time, he sort of realized well, gee, this is a resource happening in everyone's family picnics and conversations, and wouldn't it be great for all of us to have this. And commemorations were being started all over the country. And as I mentioned, some other places had this, too. But the idea to bring it to Congress and get everyone engaged and have it placed in the American Folklife Center in the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress is really what distinguishes it. It was intended to ensure that everyone had an opportunity to participate and gather this enriching information to the historical record. As you probably know, oral history in general, but specifically the Veterans History Project, specializes in the human experience of memories, what these individuals saw, self-experienced. It provides that first-hand look at war or conflict, you know, from the foxhole, from the cockpit, from the deck of a ship, including desks, kitchens, medical environments. And our diverse collections speak from those first-person experiences from US Veterans from World War I through the current conflicts. You see here that our mission is to collect, preserve, and make accessible these collections of Veterans first-person remembrances. We currently have over 110,000 of these histories. And while not all of them are fully digitized, many present digitized elements. There are over 70 web exhibits, one of which I'll get to preview with you today, that let the public, let interested folks, have a deeper dive into thematically connected, curated groups of collections so that we may all hear directly from the Veterans and better understand the realities of their service. The thematic topics range from sweethearts to medics to World War I to today's conflicts, and I'll show you how to navigate over to those. With over 18 million Veterans in the United States today, we do need your help in collecting more. And we are truly a grassroots effort that relies on voluntary impetus to gather the first-person remembrances and for folks to play your part in this historic endeavor. Every Veteran out there has a story to tell, regardless of what they may say to you in their humble way of speaking about their experience. Who are these Veterans? They are in your everyday life, maybe not as visible to you at this time. Maybe it's your dentist. Maybe it's your postal delivery carrier. Maybe it's someone in your family. If you have someone that you're thinking of, we'd love to know a little bit about them. You don't have to use their name, but often at this point in our conversation about what the Veterans History Project is, someone starts thinking, "Oh, you know, my Aunt Millie [inaudible]. Somebody needs to come and interview her." This is the point where I'd like you to take that energy of thinking about that person and how someone needs to work with her to organize her letters that may be in a shoebox and instead envision yourself in that position. We have other resources to share for how to do that, even during this time, what you can do to prepare, and we can get more into that in another session. In this session, instead, we'll focus a little bit more on what we already have. So if you have a minute to pop in some thoughts about the Veterans in your community or in your life, you know, did they serve in the Navy, what conflict did they serve, and that kind of thing, I can try as we go forward today to steer you towards collections that are related to that one. Perhaps you can call them on the phone if they're not someone in your house and share this experience with them. Being heard is one of the number one personal benefits we hear about. There's a great Maya Angelou quote about the greatest burden is the burden of a story that goes untold. And one of the great things about the project is how it brings people together, even in this time. So of these 110,000 original collections that we have, you can see a smattering of them here, we have not just oral histories. We have first-person narratives that encompass letters, photographs, journals, diaries, anything two-dimensional. We no longer accept spent casings or weapons in the form of sculptures. That's a little bit of a joke. We don't accept uniforms. But we do accept these two-dimensional, and we'll get to exactly what encompasses a collection to make it easier for you for understanding how to dive into them in just a moment. Some things I'd like to point out in this montage is that while we're so proud of how many collections have come in and what we've been able to accomplish in these 20 years, you'll notice on here some images of faces that for me represent where we have more work to do. We desperately need more women's stories and more stories of minority experience in general, whether that's Native American, African American. Minority for us also means unusual service. For instance, chaplains. So we're really looking for that wide array. Diversity for us also means geography, from where, what community, did the Veterans come from. So we're always looking for more collections from Alaska and those who served in Alaska. Just some things to consider as you navigate what you have and you think about how you might like to participate in the future. So, leave it to an educator to help a bunch of communications people figure out how to really break it down. We owe what we call our 10-20-30 rule to an educator out of Eastern Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, Mr. Jonathan Bickel, who [inaudible], oh, gosh, 10 plus years ago, and it was really a way to break down what our collecting scope policy is, which is to express that first-person narrative. Collections at a minimum can fill one of these three buckets to get started. Please note, I say get started because once a collection is started, it is possible to continue contributing to that collection and enriching it even further. So in the 10, it is 10 or more original photographs or letters. In the 20, it's 20 or more pages of journal, diary, memoir, that sort of thing, that is unpublished. And in the 30, it's 30 or more minutes of audio or video interview one-on-one, individual interviews. All of these are originals. It's originals that come from the individual family members and are at the Library of Congress where they are preserved and made accessible and discoverable for researchers and the general public. I wanted to take a few minutes to go through different ways that you can access these existing collections. We have over 7000 hours of audio and 9000 hours of video available to you on the website. Now, just putting up all those hours and continuing to put them up, which we will continue to do, is really exciting. And having that volume of material also means that you can do quite robust research on your own. But what makes it even more exciting are the ways in which you can splice and dice the data and get into these curated bits. I am going to start with how to get into our actual database. And I thought this would be useful to educators because, as I mentioned, these are primary sources, which you already know, and it's such a great opportunity to be thinking about information literacy and thinking ahead, even now towards Veterans Day, on projects that could be started now and maybe have some sort of cumulative event around Veterans Day. Here, you'll see just a snapshot of what our homepage has looked like in the past. It's not our current page, and I stole liberally from my colleagues in the Collections Access and Preservation section of the Veterans History Project who put together a fantastic 5-minute video that goes through this a little bit more so that you can reference it later, share it with students, share it with colleagues, and that's in the links that you can have access to at the end of the presentation. You'll see here the highlighted section on the homepage "Search the Veterans Collections." It's highlighted here for ease for me to point it out. When you go to the homepage itself, it will not be highlighted yellow, but it will be in that position on the homepage. If you were to click on that, you would get to this page, which is also a screenshot. All of these are screenshots. And this can be a little bit intimidating, but it really offers a level of granularity of discovery, which is really exciting. And one of the reasons I mentioned potentially thinking of someone that you know that's a Veteran so that you could learn a little bit more about them or learn about Veterans who have similar experiences is specifically because of this feature. We've often heard from participants and users that one of the most exciting things about this broad collection is being able to understand a little bit more about the experiences, the personal perspectives of Veterans who served in the same place or at the same time or in the same service. And this helps you figure out how to get there. So you'll see here that there are several tick boxes. And there's also a list on the left-hand side. I'm going to go through an example of a couple of quick ways to navigate this. Again, I've used this slide to illustrate where these items are. They do not become highlighted when you click them. In this case, let's assume that we are looking for someone who served in World War II, so I've clicked that box. We're looking for a woman because we need more women stories, thank you. And we're looking for an original photograph. In doing that, what we'll find is we get to only one collection that I'm highlighting here. You would get multiple collections, but I'm highlighting here Bobby Sue Dunaway Grape. And what you'll get is the biographical data form, which serves for us almost like a card catalog of what the collection consists of. You see her collection has manuscript correspondence, military papers, and an oral history. In her case, the collection was digitized, so then you'll see what that would look like. A digitized collection may have this photographic image attached to it or it may just have the basic information including how to get to different items, for instance the letter. You can click on that link and get to that letter. Going back to the database, if you look at the little hand, which is up touching the Browse button up on the top. See, I might get fancy here and try to use the annotations so you can see what I'm pointing to. If you look up there, you will see that Browse button, and that often gets overlooked when folks are doing a little bit of digging into the collections. If you were to click on that -- -- apologies, folks, there we go. If you were to click on that, what you would get is these tabs that open so that you can search in these sections up at the top by last name, by war and military branch, by state of residence, and by race and ethnicity. What's really fun about this is if you click on any of those links, you get a little bit more information. How many collections are attached to the state that you live in, for instance. I'm going to see if I can go backward because I want to point out something else that's really great about this feature. If you look over, and I'm going to try to annotate it again and hope I don't annoy the presentation fates, if you look over here in "All Fields Together," "Contained in," and you see my skills are just mad. Here we go. If you look over here, you'll see that you can further filter by these different fields as well. So maybe you know that you are definitely looking for a particular ship. You would highlight that area and then put that information up here in the "Enter Search Words." Oh, yeah, great skills clearly with my track set. So that is another way you can continue digging deeper and doing your own research, encouraging students to do their research, and let's see if we can make this move forward again. Great. So I want to -- now that you've had that "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" moment with our -- with the granularity of our database, I just want to bring you back. This is another front cover. And I'm noticing my time. I'll speed along here. Another front cover of our homepage. And here, you will see I've already circled in red the "Contact Us" form. That gets you to this page, which is a really great way to get help from our reference specialists, to email us or get further information. Taking us back really quickly to the homepage, I want to point out the blog, which you can get to here, which is another way that we have of doing deep dives into the collection and offering a little bit more contextual information. In this case, the exciting thing that's going to be happening this week is our new experiencing -- sorry, folks. I tempted the controls with the -- there we go. This is an old blog that we were able to publish quite a while ago, you'll see in May of 2016, and I wanted to point it out because we will be releasing quite soon this week a new Experiencing War feature in honor of the 75th anniversary of V-E Day. And in it are a couple of collections that are just incredibly robust and wonderful and dive into our World War II Pacific Theater diary collection, which up until March of 2016, not May, it was nonexistent. And we got an extraordinary collection of George Washington Percy -- Pearcy, apologies. And due to the information that we received and were able to put out publicly about that extraordinary collection, we received this collection from a gentleman named Robert Auger or Auger. And based on being able to pull that information together -- -- let's see. Sorry, I'm just wanting to really be mindful about the time. Mr. Pearcy was held for 29 months in different prisoner-of-war prisons and camps including Bilibid. And in 1940, he wrote to his mother after he'd been in the service for a little while and said, "Please, I hope that you are," -- thanks, Kathy, I didn't want to go too far over the time, and I appreciate your comment. "I hope that you" -- "Mother, I hope that you are saving these. I need them to be saved for the record." And even at some points, he mentions maybe even publishing a book. So remember that that date is 1940. Many, many, many years later, 2016 to be precise, his family was brought to the Library of Congress to work on a civil rights project. His nephews, who had inherited his diary, which he created -- you may know that in the Pacific Theater, diaries were generally not permitted, and you could face severe punishment, in fact, if you were found with one. He had created an incredibly detailed diary. The handwriting is just extraordinary. He had a lawyer's training. And he had created it on found paper. We're talking scraps of paper that were the tin food wrapper, hospital forms, maps, all bound together secretively and kept in stashes. Unfortunately, he knew as the time marched on that he was going to be put on a transport ship, that he might not make it. The family legend has it that he split the diary in two, giving one to one comrade and the other half to another comrade and said, "If I don't make it, will you please ensure my family gets this." What we learned during that time was about the gentleman for whom there were two letters present, Mr. Robert Auger, who had in fact made it back with his own incredible story, and he had made sure that those documents got to these three nephews and to the family. And when he did so, he sort of then lost touch with the family. So they had this extraordinary record, but they didn't really know too much more about the story. We were able to do blog post about it and publish about it and share this information once the collection was donated. And as a result, Mr. Auger's family found the information that we posted, and they had the other piece of a puzzle. They had -- it was now down to nephews and nieces, and they -- he had passed away a few years earlier. And they had, in fact, his Pacific Theater journal and diary and letters from that time that was a complete discovery to them because of course he'd never told them the full story. They were able to put them together. And now, here we are. And in the feature that will come out this week -- -- those two stories -- sorry, I always find this really emotional. Those two stories will be resident together on our website. So, 70 years later, they have found their way to exactly where they were intended to be so that people would know -- -- what happened to them. This is just a teaser for what you'll see the rest of the week. You'll see that there is Mr. Auger's collection. And when it goes live, you'll see Mr. Pearcy's in the row down below. And again, you get to these by going to that Experiencing War feature in the homepage. And there is Mr. Auger's deeper information. Before I go, I really would be remiss if I didn't point you towards our Teaching with Primary Resources -- Primary Sources sets. These are made available by the same colleagues here at the Library of Congress who are making this program available today. There are two of these sets that include analysis tools and all kinds of really great information about how to use these collections with your students based on standards and age group. The second one is Veterans Stories, Struggles for Participation. And if you were to click on one of these, you would get individual primary source resources, but you might also -- let's say we click on the first thumbnail, you would get Ms. Violet Hill Askins Gordon who has an extraordinary story you can see here. And you'll see that that takes you right back to that same digitized viewpoint. Even though it's in the primary source sets, you get right back to the actual primary sources. I also just want to let you know that you can follow up with us. We have been working with educators one-on-one during this time. We're offering workshops. We're offering tutorials. You can host us in the platform that makes sense to you, whichever one that you're using with your students. And we'd be happy to talk with you and schedule time to go through that. Please do just give us a little bit of cushion on the timing of things. Everyone is working through technology. And a little bit late, apologies to my colleagues. I can take time for questions. >> This is Kathy. Monica, thank you so much. That was really powerful and really amazing. I want to talk a little bit about what we were talking about this morning as you were telling me the story that you shared with the rest of the group today about the Pearcy collection and the Auger connection and the materials coming together. We talked a little bit about how teachers can use this in their classroom and really showing the power of writing and documenting what is happening to them. And there are many platforms, as the audience well knows, where people can use a megaphone, if you will. And the integration of these materials into different -- -- it's not just social studies, right? It is looking at the integration into writing and perhaps English class. We have an art teacher on the line right now. And talking about the integration, can you talk a little bit about how these stories can just go from -- where you think you're going from point A, you go to point B, and then you're off to C and D? >> One of the things that's so interesting, the current Experiencing War feature that's up now is about family connections because what we've discovered is that people were looking into the collections and finding those family connections maybe where they hadn't been before or the other way around. Many times people who are in service are related to someone. And those stories literally speak to each other. And so the point A to the point B really kind of unfolds. As the discovery of each of the individual collections go, one of my favorite personal memories, speaking of artists, we have a collection of a woman named Mimi Lesser whose service was to illustrate through sketching service members who were rehabilitating in a hospital in Europe, many of whom who actually didn't make it back. And these sketches were the last images in some cases that family members would have of this person. So she made them very warmly and sympathetically. And I happened to be staffing our phones. We take turns to do that. And I was staffing our phones, and somebody called in, and she wasn't quite sure how she'd gotten to this page. She was very emotional. And it turned out in doing research, she had been led to this page. She was on the Library of Congress page, and she, you know, clicked buttons and got there. And it was an illustration of her father that she had never seen before. And it was in the Mimi Lesser collection. So you -- I hope I'm answering your question as you were envisioning it, Kathy. But that's the kind of thing I always think of when I think of how the collections really unfold the more you delve into them. >> That's great. Yeah, that answers it perfectly. Thank you. A question came in from CTRU, which states, "My understanding is that due to privacy concerns, the database doesn't necessarily indicate ethnicity or race. Is it only included if the contributor specifically provides that information? Is that still true?" >> Oh, what a wonderful question. Are you a plant? That's such a great question. Yes, we have asked for it. It is asked for on the form. And we do our best to expose collections in that vein of thinking about diversity. However, we can't require it. And very few of our collections overall in the past -- we've been working really hard, and I understand it's been getting better to have people self-identify so diversity of experience can be understood. But it is true, we don't require it. It is voluntary. We would love for more people to do it. We believe, for instance, that we have more collections of Hispanic and/or Latino individuals, but those were not terms that were used until 1972. And sometimes in the early years, they were considered pejorative. And so there are definitely Veterans who wouldn't necessarily just jump to self-identify that way. It's changing now, but we certainly need help with that, so thank you for that question. >> And thank you for that response. Another question for the educators that are on, you talked about Veterans Day in November, and what are some of the projects you see coming in from schools, from students, from teachers? Can you talk a little bit about how educators might get started in working with VHP and collecting stories? >> Oh, sure. Well, there's a few different ways that that happens. We've seen educators who let us know actually through your colleagues or directly about really interesting things they're doing to do, say, document discovery by looking at the illustrated letters of Samuel Boylston or Tracy Sugarman to understand how envelopes work with 5th graders or how to do a deeper dive in something. So that's using existing collections, you know, scavenger hunts for primary sources within a particular curated set. Conversely, there's also actually -- working with older students, we really recommend -- we will not return collections made by younger students, but thinking about the Veterans themselves, it's really recommended, and the stories they might share, to have students who are 16 and above or 10th grade and above do interviews with the Veterans on our website. And we have a brief, less than 15 minute video that walks you through the exact process of how to interview a Veteran and how to ensure that the forms are filled out correctly and that the recordable media is done correctly so that it can be accessioned into the collection. That's one of the things that we do is we also offer workshops virtually to educators on how to do that with their classes. We suggest teams, so there would be one person operating, one student, sometimes layered students, college students working with high school students, in rare cases, high school students working with middle school students. So in that case, the middle school student wouldn't be asking the questions, but would be maybe manning the camera or will have done the research, the little bit of research in advance to make sure that the questions that they ask are appropriate and respectful and that the Veteran is treated with respect. So we have lots of ways that we can help customize that for different classroom needs. But there's also lots of resources on the website to make that a little more plug-and-play. >> That's great. Thank You, Monica. And as you were talking, I pulled in a link to the teacher's blog. You talked about the VHP blog, which is a great resource in terms of getting access to the collections and the stories. But we also coordinate with VHP in the Learning and Innovation Office. And I listed out, we have 18 blog posts that discuss VHP, so you might want to take -- the audience may want to take a look at that as well as far as some teaching ideas. If you have questions, please feel free to text them in to everyone or feel free to send them to us as the presenters, and we will certainly get those read. For those who are interested, just a couple of announcements I want to make for the programming, as I stated at the beginning of this episode, of online office hours. We're here every Tuesday and Thursday from 2:00 to 3:00 to talk about an area of loc.gov or discuss some teaching strategies, host a discussion around a very particular topic. On Tuesday -- excuse me, on Thursday. Today is Tuesday. On Thursday, we'll be diving into the manuscripts collection on loc.gov. So hopefully you can join us from 2:00 to 3:00 on Thursday. And tomorrow, we have a webinar, a professional development webinar on the introduction to the question formulation technique for primary source learning. And I'm going to go ahead and post in the registration link to that. If you are interested in receiving credits, they'll be a certificate of participation for the live participation on that event. So tomorrow at 2:00, we'll have the Right Question Institute in a webinar looking at the question formula technique and looking at primary sources. And on Thursday, we'll be going and doing a dive into the manuscripts division. So hopefully you can join us later this week. Monica, thank you so much for this. I just want to make sure that we haven't gotten any questions in. And this has really been truly wonderful in terms of learning about VHP and how to start looking into the collections. And I think -- I think showing us how to go by state is a great place to start in terms of looking at what is available from a local level, so thank you for that. And I don't know if there's anything else that you want to add, Monica? >> Just that there are so many wonderful webcasts also that feature different topics, from PTSD to music to anything you can think of. So to really just know that there's a wealth of related material. And that's it. Yeah. Thanks, Kathleen. >> Thanks, Monica. Oh, we do have a question that came in from Jen Riedel. Does VHP do podcasts? >> We do not yet do podcasts. My [inaudible] colleague, Megan Harris, was featured in, I believe, two now podcasts with the American Folklife Center. And a couple of us also participated in the Innovator and Residents podcast. And so we've been guests on podcast, but we have not yet been -- and actually, the director was just on a podcast last week, but we don't yet produce our own. Thanks for that request, though. >> That's great. Thank you. All right, any last questions for our speaker, Monica Mohindra from the Veterans History Project? A recording of this will go up hopefully by Friday. If not, first thing next week. Thank you so much for your participation. We do hope that you will join us tomorrow for the Right Question Institute and looking at the question formula technique and looking at the primary sources. And then on Thursday as we do an online office hour and go a little bit deeper into the manuscripts division. Monica, thank you so much for a great presentation. And thank you all for joining us. >> Thank you.