The American Folklife Center (AFC) continued its mandate to "preserve and present American folklife" through a number of outreach programs such as the Veterans History Project (VHP), "Save Our Sounds" and StoryCorps.
The remarkable images collected as part of the Veterans History Project include (from left) Mary Sheldon Gill bicycling on the beach, circa 1942-1943; Clare Crane on her wedding day with Herbert Johns at Our Lady of Angels Church, Cleveland; and Bruce Donald Fenchel and young boy, photograph taken by the U.S. Army Signal Corps on the day Fenchel received orders to advance to Luxembourg for the Rhine crossing.
Established by Congress in 2000, the purpose of the Veterans History Project is to record and preserve first-person accounts of armed services personnel who served during wartime, including members of Congress. During the year the VHP staff continued to gather veterans stories and make them accessible on the project's Web site. On Memorial Day 2003, 21 fully digitized collections submitted by veterans and their families were available online. This was followed by a second grouping of 23 collections on Veterans Day.
"Save Our Sounds," a joint program with the Smithsonian Institution and supported by the White House Millennium Council's "Save America's Treasures" program, seeks to preserve a priceless heritage of sound recordings housed at the two institutions. During the project's third year, considerable progress was made on all of the eight collections earmarked for digitization. These collections were made accessible on the Library's American Memory Web site.
Left, Lula Barber, Meta Kres and Meda Brendall, outside welding shop at the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyards, Baltimore; right, Samuel Boylston, "Esquire," Water Color Envelope [8/23/44].
In 2003 the AFC entered into a partnership with StoryCorps, a national project of Sound Portraits Inc., to encourage friends and family members to interview one another at recording booths established around the country. The participants receive a recording, and some oral histories may be used in radio programming. The Archive of Folk Culture will become the repository for digital files of materials collected by the project.