Contemporary (Post-WWII)

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History presented the exhibit "September 11: Bearing Witness to History" one year after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The immediacy of the events and exhibit prompted more than 10,000 visitors to share their story on cards in the exhibit hall, which are availble from the September 11 Digital Archive website. Visitors to the online exhibition may share their stories through a partnership with the September 11 Digital Archive, and thousands have already done so.

The Changing the Face of Medicine exhibit provides a wealth of information about the experiences of women in the medical profession, from the first doctors to researchers facing a glass ceiling in the late twentieth century. There are a large number of biographies of individual women searchable by location, ethnicity, career path, or medical school. Additional resources include information about how to prepare for a medical career, lesson plans for K-12 classrooms, activities for teaching anatomy and physiology and tied to the research of featured doctors. Finally, there is a separate section to "share your story" along several different themes. Visitors are asked to reflect on the care provided by female doctors, individuals they admire, having a female doctor in the family, and female doctors particularly involved in their communities.

The Hourglass Project is an effort to record the experiences of the members of the 1954 medical school class from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Members of the class were asked to describe how the changes in the health care had affected their relationships with their patients. The collection includes 30 narratives, but the project is ongoing and more accounts may be added as they are returned and made available. Each record begins with a description of the professional history of the writer, followed by the acdtual account. The records are in PDF format and range in length from 1 to 3 pages.

The New York Public Library Digital Gallery is a site that gives access to thousands of primary source images reproduced from the library's archives. The collection includes images from manuscripts, maps, books, and more. The collection is searchable and organized into seven topical categories: Arts and literature, cities and buildings, culture and society, history and geography, industry and technology, nature and science, and printing and graphics. The site also contains information about gaining rights for reproductions and a helpful user's guide to assist with finding materials quickly.

The Securities and Exchange Comission Historical Society's virtual museum and archive provides a great deal of information and hosts a large amount of primary source material. A timeline presents major events in SEC and US history since the stock market crash through the 1980's. There are a number of papers and publications from individuals and the government available for download in a PDF format, and several hundred photos organized by person. Extensive oral histories with more than 25 individuals and more than 5 roundtables are available as transcripts, audio files, or in some cases video files. The online programs hosted by the historical society are produced frequently and archived on the site as well.

In addition to the wealth of material available in the online exhibit and collection, this site includes a "Reflections" section where visitors may share their responses to seven different questions about issues raised in the exhibit and read the responses of others. In addition to asking for reactions to the website and exhibit itself, there are questions asking for visitor experiences of internment or the World War II era. There also are three more reflective questions asking visitors about the causes of interment and possibility of a similar situation in the future, the meaning of citizenship, and the tension between national security versus indiviudal liberty. Finally, there is a question asking the visitor to compare the attack on Pearl Harbor with the events of September 11, 2001.

The Gates Memory Project uses the photo sharing website Flickr to create a public and collective memory of the public art exhibit "the Gates" created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and on view in New York City's Central Park for sixteen days in February, 2005. Anyone and everyone is invited to add their photos to the project by putting them on Flickr and include them in the project by using the tag "gatesmemory." The Institute of the Future also hosts a blog to discuss how the collected images will be used and presented.

In 1999 the Washington Post produced a special report on the twentieth anniversary of the accident at Three Mile Island. There is a photo gallery and contemporary coverage of the event separated into fourteen chapters, three appendices, and a glossary. There also are links to subsequent articles about the cleanup of the nuclear reactor and the lingering health effects on local residents.

In addition to photos and articles, the website hosts transcrips of online discussions where readers posed questions to the former Pennsylvania governor Richard Thronburgh and to Washington Post energy reporter Martha Hamilton. Individual readers had the opportunity to share their personal story as well, also submitted through the online discussion format.

Virtual Motor City is a project of Wayne State University and the Walter P. Reuther Library that aims to digitize a large body of photographs from the Detroit News Collection. More than 800,000 negatives of various mediums and sizes are housed in the collection, and so far, more and 13,000 of these are available on the site. The photographs date from the late nineteenth century, but the largest part of the collection is from the twentieth century. The images are searchable, or a researcher can browse the collection by decade or subject.