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Digital Archive Continues to Record Sept. 11 Stories
By Michelle Nery
Six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Center for History and New Media
at George Mason and the American Social History Project at the City University
of New York launched the September 11 Digital Archive to capture the personal
stories of those affected by the terrible event.
Since the launch, the archive has grown tremendously, says its managing director,
Tom Scheinfeldt. “The archive now contains nearly 5,000 objects and anticipates
the imminent acquisition of thousands more,” he says. Those objects include
more than 3,000 digital images, 1,000 first-hand stories, and 200 e-mails, along
with an indexed and annotated guide to 130 web sites, representing the web’s
most thorough guide to Sept. 11 resources. “We have also collected hundreds
of other types of digital objects, including digital audio and video files, flash
files, and PowerPoint presentations,” he says.
The archive has ongoing outreach efforts to collect stories from such groups
as the Pentagon victims’ families; World Trade Center laborers; Shanksville,
Pennsylvania, community groups; Northern Virginia Fire and Rescue personnel; and
members of the Ground Zero recovery effort. “We have also forged partnerships
with the Smithsonian Institution, National Public Radio’s Sonic Memorial,
the American Association of Museums, the Museum of the City of New York, and the
New York Historical Society.”
The archive has been selected as the “Smithsonian’s designated
repository for digital materials relating to Sept. 11,” says Scheinfeldt,
and archive staff members will record the public’s stories in a section
of the museum’s 5,000-square-foot exhibit, “September 11: Bearing
Witness to History,” which opens on the anniversary of the tragedy at the
National Museum of American History, Behring Center. The archive
is collecting the first-hand Sept. 11 recollections of visitors to the Smithsonian’s
exhibit halls and web site, both in text and digital audio. Responses will be
posted in the exhibition as well as on the museum’s web site. The exhibit
will run from Sept. 11, 2002, through Jan. 11, 2003.
One of the goals of the archive is to provide a historical context for understanding
the events and to help historians and archivists improve their practices based
on the lessons learned from the project. “Most of that work is scheduled
for the second year of the project,” says Scheinfeldt. “Nevertheless,
we have made some significant strides toward providing context and educational
materials based on the collection and our experiences with digital media. For
instance, we are working closely with the Fairfax County Public Schools to provide
teachers with lesson plans and strategies for discussing Sept. 11 and its aftermath
with their students. We are also working to make our ‘Guide to Websites’
more useful for teachers by writing special teacher annotations for the most useful
sites on the web. Finally, we are perpetually refining our methods for collecting
and preserving digital materials with the intention of making our software tools
and archival practices we develop freely available to other historians.”
The archive can be found at www.911digitalarchive.org.
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