Virtually Vital
The following was originally published by the LSU Foundation in Cornerstone Winter 2019 and Spring 2020.
With a $2,000 Dean’s Circle seed grant, LSU School of Library & Information Science (SLIS) Associate Director Edward Benoit III, Ph.D., launched the Virtual Footlocker Project (VFP) to investigate how contemporary veterans and active duty personnel document their time in service. He was later awarded a $391,000 early career grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to take the project to the next level.
In our Snapchat-Skype-Instagram world, images and text appear and disappear in split seconds. How will the experiences of our generation survive the ravages of time? That’s what Benoit wondered on a long flight from Milwaukee to Baton Rouge for a job interview with LSU. Of particular interest to the second-generation Air Force veteran and Ph.D. in information studies was how much history would be lost if soldiers’ digital descriptions of events and interactions with family and each other vanished into cyberspace.
“I began thinking about what items would mark my time in service and of current military personnel,” Benoit said.
For generations, airmen, sailors, marines, and soldiers documented their wartime experiences in personal diaries, photographs, and correspondence. Veterans often kept these collections long after their service and handed them down to family members. Some items eventually make their way to museums and archives. In archives, these treasured personal accounts serve a vital role in humanizing wartime sacrifices and experiences.
“With the shift toward digital technologies over the past 20 years, the contemporary 21st-century soldier no longer creates the same analog personal archives,” Benoit said. “That creates a critical future gap in the record.”
Shortly after joining the SLIS faculty in 2014, Benoit submitted a grant application to the LSU College of Human Sciences & Education (CHSE) Dean’s Circle to explore options for safeguarding military memories made on digital devices.
“I loved the name, and we found the application to be unique,” recalled Arthur M. Halbrook, Ph.D., then vice president of CHSE Dean’s Circle.
“These firsthand accounts are recreations of a moment in time and represent reflections of how things really were,” Halbrook continued. “They’re a part of history that should be preserved. If they’re lost, they’re lost forever.”
The Dean’s Circle seed grant allowed Benoit to catalog the types of formats active duty personnel used and where they stored these documents, videos, and images. He presented preliminary results at a prestigious international conference and published an article in Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture.
Based on those findings, Benoit received the Russell B. Long Professorship in 2018 to collect and analyze additional data. Now, with the IMLS funding, “We will conduct a series of focus groups, map technical requirements on existing standards, identify technical and policy-based challenges, and propose a functional framework for protocol design,” explained Benoit. “We will develop a series of workshops for archivists.”
Though it is still in the formative stages, VFP has already received national attention and support from the United Service Organizations, Wounded Warrior Project, Louisiana Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Louisiana National Guard Museum, Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project, and National WWII Museum.
In recognition of his contributions to information science, Benoit was recently honored as CHSE’s 2019 Advocate for Diversity and received the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award. This past July, Benoit co-authored “Participatory Archives,” a book that explores how the archival community is leveraging social media and digital technology to engage users and expand collections.
While the research and technology pilot program involves only active duty military and veterans, its innovative application may one day help preserve and archive precious digital memories for families everywhere.
Originally published by the LSU Foundation in Cornerstone Winter 2019 and Spring 2020.