About
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.
Initially 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 Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University, the Archive is contributing to the on-going effort by historians and archivists to record and preserve the record of 9/11 by collecting and archiving first-hand accounts, emails and other electronic communications, digital photographs and artworks, and a range of other digital materials related to the attacks. The Archive is also using 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. To these ends the Archive has partnered with the Library of Congress, which in September 2003 accepted a copy of the Archive into its permanent collections – an event that both ensured the Archive’s long-term preservation and marked the Library’s first major digital acquisition.
In 2011, the project received a Save America's Treasures Grant, from the National Park Service and the National Endowment for the Humanities, to ensure its long-term perservation. During this grant, RRCHNM migrated the Archive to the Omeka software and relaunched the website on a more stable platform.
Through maintaining these collections, 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.
Regarding the rights management of materials in the archive, please be aware that the original contributors maintain copyright over all objects. We are no longer able to provide a referral service to secure these rights.
You can contact this project through the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
Media Enquiries
Please direct all media enquires regarding the 20th anniversary to chnm@gmu.edu.
Finding old content
In 2014, the September 11 Digital Archive moved to a new underlying system. This changed the links for many of the items in our collection.
If you have an old url which looks something like this: http://911digitalarchive.org/stories/details/10145, that url will no longer work.
However, you can use the old url to find the content in the current site. The "stories" in the old url indicates that the item is part of the Digital Archive Stories Collection - you might also see "art" or "images".
The name of that item in the new system will be the kind of thing it is - story, art, image - and the number from the old url. So what had been at http://911digitalarchive.org/stories/details/10145 [Internet Archive view] can be found at the item Story10145.xml