My name is Briana Fiandt and I’m the Curator of Collections at the Richard I Bong Veterans Historical Center in Superior, WI. I am the site supervisor for this summer’s CCDC program and I’m so excited about the project that we have undertaken.
The Bong Historical Center is a museum dedicated to telling the stories of U.S. veterans. We are particularly passionate about is documenting our veteran’s oral histories. Every veteran has a story to tell and we want to record those stories and include them in our collection permanently. We have interviews with veterans from WWI to present day and they encompass every branch and cover a huge variety of experiences. Our oral histories are used in exhibits, online, and by researchers, which range from history day students to book authors.
We started collecting oral histories before the museum even opened and to date have over 600 in the collection. The recording formats vary and include MiniDV, cassette tapes, CD’s, and born digital. There has never been a consistent file naming structure or metadata capture that properly organizes all the histories.
Working with Recollection Wisconsin and an NEH-funded project, Listening to War: Digitizing Wisconsin’s Wartime Oral Histories, we are getting a large portion of these digitized. Our CCDC student, Laura Vavrosky, is helping us this summer to put together a digital preservation policy and standardizing a file naming system that will help us to incorporate all those newly digitized interviews. As an institution, we rely heavily on volunteer work. Laura’s work in documenting and providing structure is going to be immensely helpful in providing instruction to those volunteers who are working with the collections.
I am very grateful to be participating in the CCDC project and developing our digital collection, which is so important to our mission of preserving and sharing our veterans’ stories.
For more information about Curating Community Digital Collections, visit https://recollectionwisconsin.org/digipres.
This project is made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, #RE-85-17-0127-17.
