Next Steps for September 11 Digital Archive

Many of us still find it difficult to believe that ten years have passed since the September 11 attacks. Every person who lost a loved one or who lived through the aftermath of the events experienced something unique. It was in the wake of 9/11, we at CHNM together with our friends at the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center built the September 11 Digital Archive to preserve some of those responses to the traumatic events in the months and years that followed.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the attacks, we at CHNM are directing our efforts towards preservation and are collecting once again.

We are re-opening the collecting portal and want to hear how your life has changed since September 11, 2001. By collecting reflections at this commemorative moment, we hope to further the life of the Archive as one that not only includes the most immediate reactions to the attacks, but also shows change over time as individuals reflect at different points in the post-9/11 world.

Simultaneously, a Saving America’s Treasures grant, jointly-administered by the National Park Service and National Endowment for the Humanities, will help pay for our preservation efforts as we transfer the aging collection to the Omeka platform, a more stable and standardized archival system. This is an essential step to making the contents of the Archive more accessible to scholars, students, policy makers, and the general public in the coming years.

Finally, we added a blog to the Archive to update you on our progress and detail some of the work required to transfer a large digital collection using one data model to another system with different one. We also plan to highlight some of the collections and items that have intrigued us as we sort through the Archive.

We invite you to share your reflections and follow our progress as we move forward with preserving the history of September 11.