The following is a guest blog post by Owen Rogers, a Veterans History Project (VHP) liaison specialist.
The Veterans History Project heard your feedback and released a new how-to Field Kit that’s more user-friendly than ever. Whether you’re virtually visiting veterans, or spending personal time with family members who served in the military, bring the new VHP Field Kit home for the holidays.
What’s the Field Kit? It’s the core VHP document for collecting veterans’ service history and collection information. It provides volunteer interviewers with instructions, archival forms and sample interview questions for veterans’ oral history recordings. Most importantly, it standardizes veterans’ biographical and service history information, enabling VHP staff to process the approximately 100 new collections that arrive every week!
What’s new? The electronic version of the Field Kit repopulates all repetitive information on the forms (such as names, addresses and phone numbers), saving time for both the interviewer and the participating veteran. The digital signature option saves paper by allowing both parties to sign the document electronically, so you only need to print one copy of the completed forms to ship to VHP along with the unedited interview recording and any other original materials.
Go here to access VHP’s new how-to Field Kit: //www.loc.gov/vets/pdf/vhp-2021-fieldkit.pdf
If you prefer printed Field Kits, contact VHP for hard copies of the new forms, or print your own at home. The Project will continue to accept older versions of Field Kit forms, so please feel free to use the remaining kits you have on hand.
VHP looks forward to hearing the stories you collect this holiday season and passing them down to future generations. What would you want your great-grandchildren to know about the veterans in your life? We want to know – and so will they.
Happy holidays from the Veterans History Project!