# Evangeline Gahn: 2023 Junior Fellows Program Display Day

Effective user research remains an important tool for the Library of Congress, in order to ensure user-friendly experiences of the tools used to support internal operations and external access by users. Junior Fellow 2023 Evangeline Gahn, with the support and guidance of Project Mentor Libby Bawcombe, conducted a user research study which focused on the development of a Digital Submission Portal for the Veterans History Project, a congressionally mandated initiative in the American Folklife Center Archive which collects oral histories recording the experiences of American veterans. The research project, which consisted of a comparative review of other institutions' digital submission portals for oral histories, was focused on understanding the way museums, other government agencies, and various veterans' associations requested biographical metadata from veterans, particularly regarding requests for service history information. The goal of this research was to gain insight into how others account for variations in service history, and how the flexibility of a web-based form can be used to encourage diverse and inclusive collections. It is also the intention of this research to make the metadata collection at the time of donation robust and thorough, in order to ensure accurate and true metadata for each donation to the archive. This is part of a larger initiative to modernize existing digital tools and create equitable, digital alternatives for existing analog processes.…

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2023
- By: Library Of Congress
- Archive: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2025661464/)
- Licence or status: Rights statement at the Library of Congress (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Library of Congress
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/loc/2025661464?play=1)