When a lieutenant colonel with the Marine Corps Embassy Security Group needed footage for a training video, she came to the Oral and Video History Section in the basement of Breckenridge Hall, where collection manager Tom Baughn is now digging up film for her related to the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and similar incidents.

He said others have called seeking information on topics as diverse as Marine Corps physical training in the 1960s and ’70s and how infield military post offices worked during the Korean War.

Meanwhile, when speechwriters for the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps recently needed information on a Medal of Honor recipient whose funeral the general was about to attend, they looked to the Archives and Special Collections Branch, located in the Gray Research Center, where archival team leader Jim Ginther was able to help them.

There are literally tons of Marine Corps history buried in stacks, file cabinets and banks of drawers aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico. Most of the original documents and artifacts are with these two offices, both of which belong to Education Command, also headquartered at Quantico.

In the last 18 months or so, there’s been a reorganization of the Marine Corps archives and the History Division, and after the new Simmons Center of Marine Corps History is completed next year beside the research center, they’ll all be moved under one roof.

Under the new organization, Oral and Video History was moved out from under Archives and Special Collections and became part of the History Division’s Reference Section. Most of the photographs were moved out of both offices and into the Reference Section.

Now, about half of the material in Archives and Special Collections consists of approximately 5,800 personal collections from individual Marines throughout history, including letters, diaries, orders, reports, personal photos, scrapbooks and other items.

Although they have personal collections from almost every commandant, Ginther said the archivists look for collections from every rank and military occupational specialty. “In fact, some of the best papers we’ve got here are from senior [noncommissioned officers] and junior officers, because they’re often a lot more candid,” he said.

About a year ago, he said, they received the diary of a private who was at the barracks in Washington, D.C. when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, which describes the state of affairs at the time and how the Marine Corps fit into the defense of the nation’s capital.

The other half of the archives includes documents such as command chronologies, force structure studies, reports on operations and exercises, equipment tests, student research papers and others. Every final research paper written for the Marine Corps University’s officer schools going back to the 1920s is kept there.

“It’s kind of an interesting picture of how Marine Corps thought has evolved over time in the officer corps,” Ginther said.

More than 11,000 maps dating back to the Revolutionary War period depict troop movements, maneuvers and campaigns, as well as installations.

The special collections, meanwhile, consist of books that have either been pulled from circulation or were annotated while being used for research.

Ginther said the collections are often used by veterans and others writing histories, as well as graduate students working on papers. The Department of Veterans Affairs regularly uses the command chronologies, which every unit has to write every six months, to verify claims of combat stress or other incidents. Marine Corps Combat Development Command and Marine Corps Systems Command come seeking studies on weapons or tactics and historical data to inform ongoing projects. Recently, they’ve been looking for a lot of force structure studies.

Marine Corps University students are common users of the archives, seeking material for their final papers, which will in turn end up in the archives as well.

Baughn said about two-thirds of the calls to Oral and Video History are from officers and senior enlisted Marines working on research papers for Marine Corps University, while most of the rest are civilians working on books or other research.

Since taking over the branch in October of 2012, he and a colleague have been undertaking to reorganize and document a collection that had become “a little disorganized,” he said. “It’s quite a Sherlock effort at many times.”

The first six months were spent re-housing reels of audio interviews from the Vietnam War.

“In some of them, you can hear the M-16s going off in the background, so they’re definitely field interviews,” he said.

Some of the modern video recordings weren’t labeled in the database until Baughn identified them, often by matching the length of the recordings.

Two databases in different computer programs need to be merged, and Baughn has entered about 1,000 of the 1,500 films that have been put on DVDs into a database. “But that’s out of probably 40 or 50,000 videos that we have,” he said.

In the stacks, duplicate copies — in some cases, hundreds of them — of Marine Corps short films on subjects such as the F-18 Hornet, helmets, teamwork and handball have now been eliminated.

There are still at least 5,000 reels of film that have only vague descriptions associated with them, which Baughn refers to as “the bone pile.” He opened a large, 35-millimeter film case to reveal an assortment of unlabeled 16-millimeter reels. There are stacks of these. Boxes of CDs and tapes are labeled under a forgotten numbering system. Some of the VHS, DVCPRO, U-Matic and Betamax videotapes in shelves at the center of the stacks have been labeled, while others haven’t.

Baughn said the videotapes will be relatively easy to digitize, and he’s focusing on the more difficult process of converting the reels of film to DVDs. Most of the oral history interviews — about 20,000 of them — have been transferred onto CDs.

In the near future, though, he hopes to have the Library of Congress do much of this work. The library has examined the collection and expressed an interest in making digital copies for its own archives, Baughn said, noting that the agency has the resources to digitize and catalogue the hundreds of thousands of items far more quickly than the Marine Corps could.

He said an agreement has been “pretty well worked out” with the Library of Congress, as well as the National Archives and Records Administration, to turn over most of the films, slides and other materials in exchange for digital copies, and he hopes to have this done before the move into the future Simmons Center.

The Corps has no desire to keep the original films, he said, noting that they take up space and are difficult to preserve. “There’s no way we’re going to keep the film. We can’t and shouldn’t.”

Ginther said Archives and Special Collections, too, would like to digitize as much of its collection as possible, although it does not want to divest itself of the original documents. Digitizing the collection would simply make it more available to the public, allowing copies to be checked out or even posted online. However, he said, getting the documents converted is a question of  funding.

The branch currently has about 15 terabytes of searchable, digital information, most of it command chronologies from between 1976 and 1989, he said, noting that the chronologies are the most frequently used items in the collection. The staff of seven is also working on digitizing after-action reports from World War II, now that many of the reports from the Korean and Vietnam wars are in digital format.  

None of these are available online yet, due to network credentialing issues, Ginther said, adding that he hopes to change that. “Our goal, ultimately, would be to be able to present as much as possible online.”

Although most of their material cannot be checked out, both Archives and Special Collections, and the Oral and Video History Section are open to anyone willing to visit them and survey or copy the items onsite.

“The facility is open to anybody who wants to use the materials,” Ginther said. “It’s not just limited to military use.”

— Writer: mdicicco@quanticosentryonline.com