The American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress (Washington DC) is home to the Veterans History Project and to the StoryCorps archive. At this point, the former consists of more than 60,000 interviews and related documents, the latter of more than 15,000. Both collections continue to grow. While guidelines are available to help structure the interviews themselves, processing of the resulting recordings and documents occurs at various times and locations, resulting in uncertainty as to when interviews will actually arrive at the Library of Congress; multiple databases that are not always easily integrated; different but ultimately overlapping search terms, etc.

At a time when interest in oral histories is high and families are particularly desirous of seeing their relatives' stories in a national repository, we have many different types of patrons seeking access to these materials, from interviewees themselves to casual drop-in visitors to long-term academic researchers to media producers. With only a small processing staff here, we must reconcile all of the materials that come from around the country, and find workable search mechanisms for staff, for on-site patrons, and on-line researchers, while balancing privacy and permissions issues. This paper will outline some of the strategies and compromises we've made, samples of problems we've encountered, and our hopes for longer-term solutions.