BOWLING GREEN — The personal accounts of veterans and others that were shared with Bowling Green State University students for a World War II history class will soon be available to a world-wide audience.
The Center for Archival Collections at BGSU was awarded a $6,700 grant from the Ohio History Connection to digitize and preserve a collection of interviews with more than 100 Ohioans about their wartime experiences.
The interviews, which are in audio and video formats, were recorded between 2001 and 2004 by students in the World War II history classes taught by Professor Walter Gruden. They were donated to the archival center in Jerome Library.
Michelle Sweetser, head librarian and archivist for the center, said the Ohio History Fund grant will provide partial funding for the collection of 108 interviews to be sent to a company for processing into preservation-quality digital files.
When returned to the archival center, staff will transcribe the contents of audio recordings and provide closed-captioning for videos.
"We will deliver that eventually through our online portal so that anybody can see them. We will be making the interviews available globally. We would love to see people in northwest Ohio use the recordings in the classroom and beyond to benefit from these stories and learn from these stories," Ms. Sweetser said.
Professor Gruden began donating the oral histories to the center in 2002. The last recording was made in 2004.
The students were asked to record and interview those who directly experienced the war. This could have been a military veteran, a holocaust survivor, a prisoner of war, or somebody who experienced the war on the home front.
The interviews were recorded on audio cassettes, VHS, micro-cassette, and 8 mm formats. About 50 of the recordings are videos.
Ms. Sweetser, who came to the center in 2016, said the importance of the collection and the need to have it digitized for educational purposes came several years ago when graduate student Kaysie Harrington began documenting the contents of each recording.
The researcher's work included cataloging each interview to document the person who was interviewed, what they talked about, and the student who recorded the discussion.
"That really brought the collection to our attention," Ms. Sweetser said. "This was all new to us. Kaysie going through the recordings opened our eyes to the fact we had the collection and the powerful stories contained in them."
Wood County Historical Society received a $4,010 Ohio History Fund grant to provide quality storage for the preservation of 9,000 items in the museum on County Home Road in Bowling Green.
Holly Hartleroad, museum curator, said the grant will pay 60 percent of the cost for museum-quality storage units for the museum’s collection, which includes medical equipment, cameras, lighting equipment, and housewares such as glass and china.
"We want to be good stewards of the community collections. The community trusts us to take care of local history. This is the professional way to do it," she said.
The grants for the Center for Archival Collections and the historical society were among nine awards for $76,000 announced Wednesday. Overall, History Connection has doled out more than $500,000 since the History Fund grant program began in 2013.
The history fund is a competitive grant-matching program. It is one of six tax check-off funds found on Ohio’s income tax forms. It’s funded through Ohio taxpayers’ voluntary contributions.
Contact Mark Reiter at: markreiter@theblade.com or 419-724-6199
First Published March 2, 2018, 12:00 p.m.
