Reading about other oral history projects may help you in planning, organizing, and implementing your own veterans history project. Provided here are capsule descriptions of several existing oral history programs or plans, which may serve as useful models. From them, you may gain ideas about how to:

• Set practical goals for your project.
• Establish a successful work plan.
• Engage in effective community outreach.
• Implement good interviewing and recording methods.
• Integrate your project into your institution's overall program.
• Create and preserve good documentation about your project.

Model Project 1:

Veterans Oral History Project

The Morse Institute Library
14 East Central Street Natick, Massachusetts 01760
Project coordinators: Joan M. Craig and Barbara Slavin
Telephone: (508) 647-6520
Web site: http://www.morseinstitute.org/

The Morse Institute Library is a full-service public library for the 31,000 residents in Natick, Massachusetts, and the surrounding towns west of Boston. It began its Veterans Oral History Project after Pearl Harbor Day Observances in 1997, in collaboration with the Veterans Council of Natick. Through private donations and one-time-only funding from the Town of Natick, the project has successfully interviewed and videotaped more than one hundred veterans, concentrating on those who served in World War II.

The project's Steering Committee meets regularly with individuals and organizations (including the Rotary Club, Jewish War Veterans, and local nursing homes) to inform them about the project and to offer a diverse array of veterans an opportunity to participate.

Interviews are conducted by the library's community relations coordinator Joan M. Craig. They are scheduled one per week, in advance, either Tuesday morning or evening (11 a.m. or 7 p.m.) and usually last sixty minutes. The participants respond to a standard list of questions, which the veterans are given in advance of the interviews. Each veteran signs a release form allowing the library permission to use the tapes for the library's purposes.

The veterans are videotaped in a comfortable study room in the library. Three tapes are made at the time of the interview–the original archival version (SVHS), one public reference copy for the cataloged collection, and one copy to be given to the veteran. The project Web site, www.natickvets.org, highlights each veteran and displays a scanned photograph showing the veteran at the time of his or her service.

One of the project's coordinators studied at the Summer Institute on Oral History at Columbia University in 2000. She works about fifteen hours per week on the project, which includes time spent interviewing veterans and working with the director of veterans' services on a database of veterans' names. Two veterans of World War II have donated hundreds of hours of time to the project. An intern from the Northeastern University doctoral program in history has also worked on the project as part of his course work.

Both Paula Polk, library director, and John McGillivray, veterans services director, hope to continue the project as long as funding is available. Initial funding supported the purchase of the first set of equipment, including a TV/VCR, video camera, lights, microphones, and tapes. Private donations, funds from local veterans organizations, and appropriations from the Town of Natick have supported the project.

Model Project 2:

Oral Histories of 20th-Century Montana Military Veterans

Montana Historical Society Archives
225 North Roberts
P.O. Box 201201 Helena, MT 59620-1201
Project coordinator: Jodie Foley, Archivist and Oral Historian
Telephone: (406) 444-6779
Web site: http://www.his.state.mt.us

The Montana Historical Society is a medium-sized state historical society that has been conducting oral history interviews since 1915. The earliest interviews were recorded by hand and consist of summary notes. Since the invention of audio tape recorders, interviews have been recorded on reel-to-reel tapes and cassette tapes. In the 1980s, the society conducted several large oral history projects, such as "Montanans at Work" and "Native American Educators," funded by the Montana Cultural Trust. More recently, it collected seventy veterans oral histories as part its project "20th-Century Montana Military Veterans," and in July 2001, it began a project "Reflections of the Forgotten War" to collect twenty-five histories from Korean War veterans in Montana.

Jodie Foley, archivist and oral historian at the society, is coordinating this latest project. She has located veterans by first contacting the state's Department of Veterans Affairs and then speaking about the project to groups of active veterans around the state. She asks veterans' associations to include in their newsletters information about the project and to distribute an interest survey to their readers. (Many veterans organizations are well organized and well funded.) Foley randomly selects a smaller sample from the responses. She then seeks geographic and experiential balance and diversity from the sample set. In conducting the interviews, Foley has had success using the PMD series of Marantz brand tape recorders, a Sony external microphone, and 60-minute Maxell Professional audiotapes.

For information about the society's oral history holdings, visit its Web site or consult the publication Speaking of Montana: A Guide to the Oral History Collection at the Montana Historical Society. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1997.

Model Project 3:

The Cold War Comes to Nebraska Oral History Project

Nebraska Humanities Council, Lincoln, Nebraska
Strategic Air Command (SAC) Museum, Ashland, Nebraska
Project planners and developers:
Barbara W. Sommer, barbsom@aol.com
Robert Hurst, rob.hurst@dependanet.com
Mary Kay Quinlan, OHAeditor@aol.com

While this project's focus is not on military veterans or wartime activities, its concise plan can be applied to veterans oral history projects being conducted under the aegis of the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project.

The plan outlines a multiyear oral history project focusing on the development of the Strategic Air Command headquarters in Nebraska during the Cold War, 1946-92. Its straightforward planning approach could be replicated by other projects to ensure clarity and success. Components of the Nebraska plan include:

• statement of scope
• mission statement
• list and description of advisory board members
• project time line
• interviewee list
• project methodology (including a discussion of legal and ethical standards, management and record-keeping issues, and guidelines for interviewing, processing, and transcription)
• training program guidelines
• publicity plan
• funding sources
• budget
• bibliography

The project plan states that the work will be performed in accordance with the "Oral History Association Evaluation Guidelines" and to the highest standards of the profession. Public programming around the project will increase awareness of these oral history standards. The three-member project team includes a project director, who is a historian and oral historian; a military advisor and historian; and a journalist and oral historian. All are affiliated with the Nebraska Foundation for the Preservation of Oral History, an association with ties to Nebraska Wesleyan University.

The planning portion of the project was underwritten by the Nebraska Humanities Council, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Strategic Air Command (SAC) Museum. The project's planners have expressed hope that their plan might "serve as a model for others who want to create an oral history project." They are currently seeking funding to implement the next stage of the project.