Excerpt:
The September 11 Digital Archive 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. Funded by a major grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and organized by the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the Digital Archive will contribute to the on-going effort by historians and archivists 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. The September 11 Digital Archive project formally ended in June, 2004, and although we continue to collect accounts submitted through the website, we are no longer updating the website.
Annotation:
The September 11 Digital Archive is a joint project of George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and the City University of New York Graduate Center’s American Social History Project. The Archive is the world’s foremost digital collection dedicated to preserving the history of the September 11 terrorist attacks and contain over 135,000 digital items – including more than 40,000 emails and other electronic communications, nearly 17,000 first-hand stories, and more than 15,000 digital images. Visitors are able to contribute their stories, images, emails, and other digital files through the website, and most items fall into one of the following categories: witness accounts, observer accounts, electronic communications, still images, moving images, and audio recordings.