September 11 Digital Archive Launched
The Center for History and New Media at GMU has just launched the September 11 Digital Archive (http://911digitalarchive.org) to preserve the history of September 11 by creating a permanent digital record of the 9/11 events and the responses to those events. They need the help of the GMU community–and that of friends, family, and neighbors–to make this important project a reality. They are asking people to contribute personal accounts and recollections at http://911digitalarchive.org/stories/add.html. The experiences need not have been at or near the Pentagon or the World Trade Center, nor do they need to be heroic or harrowing personal tales. These can be very short or much longer reminiscences about how you were affected by the 9/11 events. In addition to personal recollections, they are providing a simple way online to archive email messages (at http://911digitalarchive.org/email/add.html) that people wrote or received about the events and a repository of digital images (at http://911digitalarchive.org/images/add.html), where people can easily place the pictures they took or received of the 9/11 events. Please contribute your own personal experiences or emails and encourage others to participate as well.
The September 11 Digital Archive is funded by a major grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and organized by CHNM in collaboration with the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The Digital Archive is working with many other groups around the country, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Behring Center, to preserve this history. Feel free to contact them via email at info@911digitalarchive.org if you need further information.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The September 11 Digital Archive (http://911digitalarchive.org) uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania and the public responses to them. to record and preserve the record of 9/11 by: collecting first-hand accounts of the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath (especially voices currently under-represented on the web), collecting and archiving emails and digital images growing out of these events, organizing and annotating the most important web-based resources on the subject, and developing materials to contextualize and teach about the events. The Digital Archive will also use these events as a way of assessing how history is being recorded and preserved in the twenty-first century and as an opportunity to develop free software tools to help historians to do a better job of collecting, preserving, and writing history in the new century. Our goal is to create a permanent record of the events of September 11, 2001. In the process, we hope to foster some positive legacies of those terrible events by allowing people to tell their stories, making those stories available to a wide audience, providing historical context for understanding those events and their consequences, and helping historians and archivists improve their practices based on the lessons we learn from this project.