Sunday, December 18, 2016
Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS
It’s D-Days – that is, digital days – 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 histories will take longer than the war was fought: 10 years and $11 million dollars. There’s more than 22,000 hours of audio and video to be handled, thousands of documents to be digitized and millions of words transcribed.
Ultimately, all these firsthand accounts of Pearl Harbor, the D-Day invasion, Germany’s surrender, Hiroshima, the homefront and more will be online.
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’s six historians also are racing to interview the last veterans alive.
“It’s a fine balance. We have a sense of urgency to collect as many stories as we can ... but we also know it’s extremely important moving forward to provide access” online, said Stephen Watson, the museum’s executive vice president and chief operating officer.
Since May, the World War II Museum has collected 500 oral histories. But the war generation is fading fast.
So far there are 4,000 staff-collected video oral histories, 3,000 video and audio recordings made by others, and nearly 2,000 “written histories” such as journals and diaries that can be photographed, annotated and transcribed for online research, said Keith Huxen, the museum’s senior director of history and research.