Volunteer Training Program

From June 2017-July 2018, I worked on behalf of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) as a Research Associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  In this role, I assisted DPAA in its mission to locate, recover, and identify the remains of the roughly 83,000 American servicemen who are listed as Missing in Action (MIA) since the Second World War.  One challenge the agency faced was the sheer volume of MIA cases compared to the relatively small number of professional staff tasked with investigating them.  To help increase the agency’s bandwidth, I founded and led a 12-person volunteer research program that enlisted the help of university students and community members to assist with casework.  Since most of my volunteers were not trained in historical research, I created a training program to teach them basic research skills and how to access the historical resources available in our location.

This research guide (see below) was one of the primary tools I created to help volunteers get started.  It begins by outlining our objective and basic methodology, then walks participants step-by-step through the process of uncovering new information about all aspects of an MIA case, from collecting biographical details to learning about where a soldier may have fallen on the battlefield.  It includes links to digital resources as well as tips for which local archives and libraries to visit.  The guide was available to volunteers through Box Sync, a cloud-based file-sharing program.

Since volunteers were rarely familiar with the Battle of Buna—the primary focus of our research—I also provided them with a guide to the battle’s history (below) along with instructions to help them get started learning about where their soldier fit in.  This points to a variety of books and primary sources to consider, and provides tips for how to document and cross-reference the information found.

In order to make even more interactive guides and provide additional support to my volunteers when we couldn’t meet in person, I took part in a workshop on Adobe Captivate eLearning software in April, 2018, where I learned the basics of the program.  I then set out to create short video presentations to help volunteers overcome any obstacles they encountered in their research.  The following is my first experiment with such a video.  I used Captivate’s screen capture feature to explain the historical context surrounding a portion of the Battle of Buna, while using standard maps and ArcGIS to reference specific geographic areas.