{"id":30195,"date":"2016-12-19T09:01:46","date_gmt":"2016-12-19T17:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/wwii-on-www-thousands-of-oral-histories-going-online\/"},"modified":"2016-12-19T09:01:46","modified_gmt":"2016-12-19T17:01:46","slug":"wwii-on-www-thousands-of-oral-histories-going-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/wwii-on-www-thousands-of-oral-histories-going-online\/","title":{"rendered":"WWII on www: Thousands of oral histories going online"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW ORLEANS \u2014<\/strong> It\u2019s D-Days \u2014 that is, digital days \u2014 at the National World War II Museum, with historians seeking to storm the internet and move thousands of first-person accounts of the fighting online.<\/p>\n

Executives at the National World War II Museum say creating a vast online collection of 9,000 existing oral and written histories will take longer than the war was fought: 10 years and $11 million. There\u2019s more than 22,000 hours of audio and video to be handled, thousands of documents to be digitized and millions of words transcribed.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, all these firsthand accounts of Pearl Harbor, the D-Day invasion, Germany\u2019s surrender, Hiroshima, the homefront and more will be online.<\/p>\n

Founded in 2000, the museum is a top New Orleans attraction. The digital collection is open to the world. But only about 250 of its oral histories are online so far. Uploading more will take time, partly because the museum\u2019s six historians also are racing to interview the last veterans alive.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a fine balance. We have a sense of urgency to collect as many stories as we can … But we also know it\u2019s extremely important moving forward to provide access\u201d online, said Stephen Watson, the museum\u2019s executive vice president and chief operating officer.<\/p>\n

Since May, the World War II Museum has collected 500 oral histories. But the war generation is fading fast.<\/p>\n

Even people with childhood memories of the war are now in their 70s, noted James Gilmore, archives specialist in oral history at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He said the Holocaust Museum has about 10,000 oral histories available online. Those also are among more than 66,000 that can be viewed or listened to on site.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur oral histories have been invaluable resources in teaching about Holocaust history and fighting Holocaust denial. They\u2019ll become even more precious once the eyewitness generation is no longer here,\u201d Gilmore said.<\/p>\n

Putting oral histories online is not just a matter of uploading and linking to huge audio and video files. The World War II Museum\u2019s six historians also help laboriously describe their contents for online searching, in a process more extensive than the Holocaust Museum\u2019s has been so far.<\/p>\n

Take the four videos spanning two hours of interviews with Harold E. Ward, a Navy lookout on the cruiser San Francisco when Japanese warplanes struck Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.<\/p>\n

The videos are divided into 12 segments, each with detailed annotations describing what Ward talks about section by section \u2014 like the one with Ward recalling the attack .<\/p>\n

The San Francisco was being overhauled when the planes came in low and slow, leaving the fleet in flames. \u201cI just stood and watched,\u201d Ward said. As a lookout, he was wearing headphones. An ensign somewhere else asked him to describe the scene.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe says, \u2018What\u2019s going on there?\u2019\u201d Ward recounted. \u201cSo I told him we were being attacked by the Japanese Air Force.\u201d The ensign\u2019s response: \u201cDon\u2019t you get wise with me, Ward. I asked you a question.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I began to describe what I was looking at,\u201d Ward continued. \u201cAnd there was a dead silence when I finished speaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far there are 4,000 staff-collected video oral histories, 3,000 video and audio recordings made by others, and nearly 2,000 \u201cwritten histories\u201d like journals and diaries that can be photographed, annotated and transcribed for online research, said Keith Huxen, the museum\u2019s senior director of history and research.<\/p>\n

He said the six historians travel widely, scheduling at least four interviews per trip. Afterward, the historians add catalog information, including a short description of contents and when and where interviews were made. They then begin annotating the video with keywords mostly likely to be searched, Huxen said.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, the public will be able to go online, access the histories, search them, watch the video with face and voice … with a verbatim transcription scrolling or at least accessible,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The museum has allocated about $4.4 million for the project so far \u2014 about two-thirds from donations and grants, and the rest from the museum\u2019s operating budget, Watson said. One records management company, Iron Mountain, gave $100,000 to digitize 100 interviews this year and expects to donate a similar amount next.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe commitment to this will never end,\u201d because there will be a constant need to update computers and software and to move the collection \u201cto new forms of data storage that we don\u2019t even know about now,\u201d Watson noted.<\/p>\n

The idea of putting the collection online was borne of bleak days after Hurricane Katrina flooded much of New Orleans in 2005. The museum didn\u2019t flood, but was closed for months to repair damage from roof leaks and from looting in non-exhibit areas. Few visitors showed up when it did reopen, prompting executives to consider how they could still reach people even when a city was emptied out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to think about how to fulfill our mission without people being here,\u201d said Nick Mueller, museum president and CEO.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Online: www.nationalww2museum.org<\/p>\n

__<\/p>\n

\u2022 Associated Press writer Bill Cormier contributed to this report from Atlanta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW ORLEANS \u2014 It\u2019s D-Days \u2014 that is, digital days \u2014 at the National World War II Museum, with historians seeking to storm the internet and move thousands of first-person accounts of the fighting online. Executives at the National World War II Museum say creating a vast online collection of 9,000 existing oral and written […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":30196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-30195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30195"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=30195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}