Spokane Valley Library receives certificate from Library of Congress for veteran recording project
An employee at the Spokane Valley Library received a certificate of appreciation Friday for his role in helping record stories from local veterans to be submitted to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.
The local Jonas Babcock Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, one of several groups working to preserve veteran stories, has been using the new recording studio at the Spokane Valley Library to interview veterans about their experiences. Employee Jeremy Mullin handles the technical aspects of running the studio and also creates community programming.
“It’s great to have the studio,” Mullin said. “It gives us the opportunity to reach more parts of our community.”
Mullin said he’s been happy to help with the veteran recordings. “I feel it’s connected to two of our missions, community engagement and involvement,” he said. “We need to archive these things. If our community isn’t doing it, if we’re not doing it, it will be lost.”
Being in the studio while veterans tell stories about their service is an emotional experience, Mullin said.
“Hearing a story that’s real history puts you in a different place than if it was fiction,” he said. “These individuals went through that. It’s something you feel when they’re speaking.”
The veterans not only talk about action-filled moments from their time in the service, Mullin said, but about what happened to them after and how they cope with their experience.
U.S. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers was on hand Friday to present the Library of Congress certificate to Mullin. She thanked him for using his technical expertise to make sure the strict Library of Congress requirements are met with each recording.
“This is so important, to preserve the stories for future generations and get these stories directly from veterans,” Rodgers said.
Last year, the Library of Congress reached out to federal legislators to ask for help in getting more recorded veteran histories in its collection. Rodgers and her staff helped organize a workshop in Spokane last summer to provide training for people interested in interviewing veterans for the Veterans History Project.
While the focus of such projects is often focused on World War II as the number for survivors shrinks, the Veterans History Project collection includes veterans from the Vietnam, Korean and Persian Gulf wars, as well as more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The audio and video Veterans History Project recordings collected by the Library of Congress can be found at www.loc.gov/vets.