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) and StoryCorps.
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 at www.loc.gov/vets. During the year, the project acquired an additional 20,000 submissions comprising 80,000 items, bringing the total to 40,000 submissions comprising more than 160,000 items. On Veterans Day 2005, the VHP (in association with National Geographic Books) published "Forever a Soldier: Unforgettable Stories of Wartime Service," its second in a series of books based on these submissions.
Left, folklife specialist Ilana Harlow greets Danny and Annie Perasa in front of the Library's Madison Building where a mobile StoryCorps booth was set up to record oral histories. The couple's touching story of love and marriage gained national attention when it aired on National Public Radio, a partner in the StoryCorps project; right, Peggy Bulger, head of the American Folklife Center, accepts the first collection of 2,327 stories from David Isay, founder of Sound Portraits Productions, who initiated the StoryCorps project. - Michaela McNichol
During the year, the American Folklife Center acquired its first installment of oral histories through the StoryCorps project. This national oral history project to instruct and encourage Americans to record one another's oral stories was inspired by David Isay of Sound Portraits Productions. Isay was inspired by the Library's collection of oral history recordings made by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The StoryCorps interviews, a contemporary corollary to the WPA recordings, are the AFC's first "born digital" collection.
