NEH: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources War, remembrance, and the power of records: Digitizing the Library of Virginia’s WWII Separation Notices

FAIN: PW-285051-22

Library of Virginia (Richmond, VA 23219-1905)
Kathy Jordan (Project Director: July 2021 to present)

The digitization of 250,000 separation notices of WWII-era service members and a crowdsourced transcription project to make them fully text searchable online. The library would also make the information from the notices available as a dataset for research. 

The Library of Virginia Foundation respectfully requests on behalf of the Library of Virginia a $315,000 implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help digitize and make discoverable over a three-year period (2022-2025) an extensive collection of World War II separation notices that has been in its care since 1950, but has remained largely closed to the public until 2022. With a total project cost of more than $715,000, grant funding from NEH will enable the Library to accelerate the accessibility of these WWII separation notices for humanities research and enrich public connections to the stories of WWII. The Virginia WWII Separation Notices collection contains approximately 250,000 separation records for men and women in the Armed Forces during WWII who were discharged between 1942 and 1950 (bulk 1944-1946).