A new online tool is improving access to overseas war memorials and records

Guest:	Charlotte Meunier
Title:	Museum curator for the American Battle Monuments Commission
Summary:	For decades, the American Battle Monuments Commission has served as guardian of U.S. military cemeteries and memorials around the world. A new online catalog now extends that mission by making records and collections accessible far beyond those physical sites.

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Interview transcript

Charlotte Meunier So the American Battle Monuments Commission is a federal agency and we maintain and manage U.S. Military cemeteries, monuments and memorials overseas. We have about 26 cemeteries, 31 monuments and they are spread in 17 countries.

Terry Gerton And you just crossed the hundred year threshold a couple of years ago, what has been maybe the biggest change or two in managing these assets over that century?

Charlotte Meunier So our mission mainly is to maintain these sites the way they were built to honor the fallen and to welcome the next of kin and the visitors. But our mission has evolved because with the way the people, the reason the people are coming, we used to have a lot of next of kin and now we have also people coming to visit the sites, not necessarily because they’re related to a soldier. So we have to also welcome them and provide them with our services. We have added to some of our sites, some visitor centers. We are bringing a level of interpretation to the mission, but the main mission, the center of the mission which is taking care of the cross and the grass is still the same. And I think we are very proud to be able to maintain the mission as it started originally 100 years ago.

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Terry Gerton And how challenging is it these days to manage that international relationship?

Charlotte Meunier Well, we have a very good relationship between the host nation, where the cemeteries are and the cemeteries itself. It’s very important for us to build a strong relationship between them, the local communities that we are working with, for example, local schools, local cultural structures to build network and to have group coming to visit our sites. So it’s very important for us to present the best aspects of the United States and talk about the story of the United States in the host nation, but also to acknowledge the fact that we are hosted in foreign nations and how to work with them in a good relationship.

Terry Gerton Well, let’s come back to that mission expansion that you alluded to earlier about expanding beyond just next of kin to all kinds of visitors, the commission has just put up an online catalog that displays all kinds of assets and memorial types of items. Tell us about that and what’s new.

Charlotte Meunier Yes, the online catalog is a great project and I’m thrilled to be working on it. It’s a project we’ve been working on for the past several years. It’s the, I would say, a window to the collection from the ABMC. So my work as a museum curator is to collect, preserve, maintain, and communicate the historic heritage of the agency. And the online catalog is a way to provide access to all these beautiful pieces that we have to the most. It’s not always easy for people to come to our sites or to access, to visit our sites. So it’s a way for us to be able to publish everything we have in the collection. The collection is content, I can talk about that for hours, but we have a lot of historic documents and historic objects, and these elements are talking about the soldier and the battle, of course, but also the story about the agency itself and how we design, build, and maintain the sites. It’s uniforms, but it’s also blueprints and photographs of events. It covers the whole area of what the agency does. It is covering all of our missions.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Charlotte Meunier. She’s museum curator for the American Battle Monuments Commission. I had a chance to scan through the catalog a little bit, and it really is stunning. It’s clearly not just for historians or not just next to kin. Who do you hope uses it and how?

Charlotte Meunier Well we hope everyone will use it. We are willing to touch as many people as possible. We are hoping to interest visitors that want to come to cemeteries, people that cannot access cemeteries, other cultural institutions that will be interested in, for example, borrowing some of our items to build an exhibition. We are interested in connecting with teachers, guides, anyone who is interested in our mission should be able to come on the online catalog, go through everything we have. As I was saying, we have paper documents, we have sculpture, art pieces, we have building features, we have furniture. Our collection is covering a lot of aspects and topics, so we are hoping to interest as many people as possible.

Terry Gerton One of the most powerful experiences is actually visiting one of these cemeteries or monuments in person. How do you hope people kind of replicate that experience through the catalog? How does it tug on heartstrings, I guess, if you will?

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Charlotte Meunier You have several ways of enjoying it. You can either just go through the catalog itself and do research or just jump from an object to another. But we’ve also added the curator’s collection, which is another feature. Every month, we are going to highlight some pieces of the collection, either one object or several of them, creating connection between all of them. The first one we did for March was the one about the Lafayette Esquaderie. So we gathered 16 objects related to the pilots from the Esquadrie. Next month, we will be highlighting the Pershing Desk, which is a desk we have in our Paris office that we just did the conservation equipment on it. And then we will able, one month after another, to highlight some of our elements. We can, for example, we have a lot of, as I was saying, easter egg furnishing, we can, for example, recreate the room. With connecting all the records from each piece of furniture and show people what a reception room in Normandy or in Cambridge looked like. And so we will be able to create this virtual exhibition to show people how the objects interact with each other, telling another story or showing another aspect on the story.

Terry Gerton How does the online catalog then connect with, for example, the lesson plans that you also share on the website?

Charlotte Meunier Yeah, so it connects with the lesson plans for a teacher. It’s a tool that can be used for so many aspects. You can, for example, take a theme, you know, like a woman in war or a gold star mother, and you can find in the online catalog series of photographs. You can find the banners, historic objects that gold star mothers were carrying with them. And a teacher can use the record of the object that they will find online to do their own virtual exhibition if they want, they can print the picture, they can print their records, they can have all the information such as a date, materials, description. And of course, it’s, I would say it’s a first step, but then they can also reach out to us and ask us more questions if they want and we can help them, you know, build anything that they want to do that. So I would say support the interpretation mission from the ABMC. It brings other material, other documentation, and it connects with this mission as well as the other ABMC mission.

Terry Gerton As America celebrates its 250th birthday this year, is the commission looking to roll out any other sorts of exhibits or programs to support that?

Charlotte Meunier Yes we have several events planned, mostly around the July time. We will be able to publish these on the abmc.gov. Users will be able to find the schedule of these celebrations online. And we are also connecting some of our visitor centers to the event, for example, in the Lafayette Esquaderie Memorial, we will be switching some of the parts of the exhibition to connect to the events. So you will be to find quite some interesting events at that moment.

Terry Gerton That’d be great. And then as you look ahead, I mean, I know there was a lot of effort to roll out this online catalog. What will you be looking at a year or two from now to find out if it’s been successful, if people have connected with it, if it has had the impact you hoped?

Charlotte Meunier Well, we, of course, have the technical aspect of it. We are able to monitor the number of visits and to tell if people are interested. I think what will be very important for us is if we hear feedback from people, like visitors, if they come to cemeteries and they talk about it, like, ‘oh, I’ve seen that chair for real, but also online.’ that will be a very good way for us to know if people aren’t interested. I think it will also be efficient for us if we are able to build this network in connection with other cultural institutions. I think if we are able to reach out to other structure and create the connection, having them loan us items and us loaning them, that would be very interesting. And hopefully we will be able to highlight more and more of the collection, building more of these virtual temporary exhibition. And this collection, what it’s great about, currently we have several items in it. But it’s still a working process. We are still adding items to it. We are identifying elements. And so it’s growing like our mission. We are adding additional stuff. And so we will have plenty of more opportunities to talk about it.

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