This spring, we shared the news of a grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support our project Listening To War: Digitizing Wisconsin’s Wartime Histories. This initiative builds on the NEH-funded planning work we undertook in 2016-2017 to identify veterans’ oral history interviews in small and mid-sized libraries and historical societies across the state. Recollection Wisconsin is now excited to welcome Shawn Vesely to our team to lead this next phase of the project.
As our Audiovisual Project Archivist for the next two years, Shawn will oversee the digitization and cataloging of 1,100 wartime oral histories from 22 Wisconsin collections and work with partners at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, UW-Madison Archives and UW-Milwaukee Libraries to coordinate access to and preservation of these important recordings.
Shawn graduated from the iSchool at UW-Madison in 2016 with an MA in Library and Information Studies in 2016, with a focus on archives and cataloging. “As a Wisconsin wartime veteran, this project is very important to me,” Shawn says. “It is a real privilege to handle the responsibilities of extending the life, reach, and visibility of these materials.”
