We at RRCHNM continue to expand the resources in the September 11 Digital Archive (911DA) as individuals and institutions want to share their collections with us. For example, retired Federal Aviation Administration employee Brian Sullivan donated a collection that offers insight into passenger safety prior to and on September 11, 2001 in the form of reports, guides, testimonies of Federal Aviation Administration employees and airport workers, meeting minutes, memos, transcripts, and affidavits. Graduate student Alyssa Fahringer scanned and described the items in the Boston Federal Aviation Administration Filings collection.  The Center also recently received digital scans of visitor comment cards contributed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in 2011. Alyssa is adding those items this fall.

As RRCHNM continues to maintain and add collections, we are also working to improve computational access to these 150,000 digital items. With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Omeka team is developing plugins that will help users to mine the texts available in the site, and others like it build in Omeka.

Individual items contributed to 911DA have rich personal stories to tell that call for a close reading of the text or examination of contributed images. In some cases, a more powerful story emerges by examining the aggregate, with the promise of surfacing larger insights through “distant reading,” an analytical procedure by which researchers evaluate large bodies of text in the aggregate as a way to discern otherwise opaque patterns and meanings. To enable both close and distant reading, simple annotation and word analysis plugins are in development. The Omeka team will use the vast collections of 911DA as a case study to demonstrate the benefits of using the new plugins and to publish new insights found in this corpus of materials.

Anniversaries offer time for us to reflect and think back on events from the past, and we again ask for you, your family members, your students to share how your life has changed since September 11, 2001. If you recently visited the September 11th Memorials in New York, the Pentagon, or Shanksville we want to hear about your experiences. By collecting reflections at this commemorative moment, we hope to further the life of the September 11th Digital Archive as one that not only includes the most immediate reactions to the attacks, but also shows change over time as individuals reflect at different points in the post-9/11 world.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, there was tremendous uncertainty about how America would respond to what had happened. As discussion shifted to the likelihood, and then inevitability, of a military response, anti-war groups organized to try to stop it, including the Madison Area Peace Coalition. The bulk of this collection reveals the group’s advocacy work, from organizing teach-ins, rallies, and collaborations with other affiliated groups. Other materials include opinion pieces and news articles as well as more general responses to the changing political situation.

While the collection offers substantial material to any researcher interested in American attitudes towards war and use of force, it also offers a number of less orthodox avenues for inquiry. Those interested in historical memory and the legacy of the Vietnam War will find lengthy discussions within MAPC of how opposition movements to US involvement in Vietnam shaped their efforts and understanding of the post-9/11 world. For those interested in politics, the collection offers good source material tracing MAPC’s affiliations and efforts to build coalitions and highlight the then growing though tentative connections between the anti-war left and the libertarian movement.

Discussion of race and religion in America also feature prominently throughout the collection, particularly as it pertains to Americans of Middle Eastern heritage and practicing Muslims. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the members of MAPC were deeply concerned that these communities would be targeted, and actively sought to organize for their defense.

The MAPC collection is one of many we will highlight that will give researchers a more nuanced look at the responses to the September 11 attacks.

Conceptualized in the same year as Wikipedia, the September 11 Digital Archive was at the forefront of what became known as Web 2.0, where web users were invited to be collaborators. The Archive invited the public to participate in the process of creating and preserving their own history. Though not the first collecting site of its kind, the Archive certainly became the largest as an outgrowth of the ECHO initiative (Exploring and Collecting History Online). ECHO enabled RRCHMN to experiment with different online collecting tools in an effort to help small organizations build sites to collect and present the recent history of science, technology, and industry.

The Archive’s early adoption of social media and collecting digitally allowed the project to capture thousands of first-hand accounts and born-digital materials from ordinary people at a time when other avenues for online sharing did not exist. Using a simple web form, the Archive was open to anyone with an internet connection, and in turn, those collected stories, photos, videos, art works, sounds, were available for anyone with web access to browse. To reach those without ready access to the Internet, we established partnerships with labor, ethnic, and community associations to create special collection outreach efforts. Drawing upon the instincts of oral history projects to seek out stories from witnesses, the Archive did so in much greater numbers and at much lower cost than would have been possible using traditional oral historical or archival methods.

The success of the September 11 Digital Archive as an online collecting site motivated others to build sites of their own. This response heavily influenced RRCHNM to develop a standalone digital collections and memory banking software, enabling anyone to quickly launch a digital memory bank to document or commemorate events deemed significant. That software would become Omeka.

One of the earliest projects built on the software that would become Omeka was the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which launched soon after the devastating hurricane season of 2005 and collected over 25,000 digital items. The Hurricane project helped RRCHNM test the earliest versions of Omeka and aided in the development of the popular contribution plugin. Soon after the Omeka software was available in 2008, other collecting projects launched including Virginia Tech’s, April 16 Archive and the Catawba River Docs.

As we continue to migrate the 150,000 digital objects in the Archive to the more stable Omeka platform, we are reminded how significant this project was when it started. And, we are grateful that the National Park Service and National Endowment for the Humanities designated the September 11 Digital Archive as an American treasure worth saving.

Many items were contributed directly through the Archive’s contribution form from individuals interested in sharing their experiences. We also collaborated with scores of organizations to save and publish materials they collected.

Soon after the Archive launched, the team collaborated with major cultural institutions, including the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, American Association of Museums, Museum of the City of New York, Brooklyn Historical Society, The New-York Historical Society, Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at CUNY, and Museum of Chinese in America.

We also contacted nationally-important institutions including the American Red Cross, Service Employees International Union, Fire Department of New York, New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, U.S. Department of Justice, and National Guard and accessioned collections from their archive. All collections are available for browsing.

While collecting materials from large organizations was very important, we also reached out to smaller ones, including the SEPT11INFO discussion group, TomPaine.com, the Independent Press Association, the Madison Area Peace Coalition, Global Kids, New York City P.S. 721, and Asociación Tepeyac de New York.

Additionally, the Archive is responsible for three important collections of digital materials. The first and largest of these is Here Is New York (HNY). In response to the World Trade Center tragedy, and to the unprecedented flood of images that resulted from it, a unique exhibition of photographs was displayed in a storefront in Manhattan’s SoHo.

Subtitled “A Democracy of Photographs,” the collection contains nearly 7,000 high-quality images. Anyone who had taken pictures relating to the attacks was invited to submit images to the gallery, where they were digitally scanned, printed and displayed on the walls alongside the work of top photojournalists and other professional photographers. Following its run in SoHo, the exhibition traveled to twenty locations around the world.

Smaller in scale, but no less unique, the Sonic Memorial Project is a collection of digital audio related to the history and collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Shortly after September 11th, National Public Radio’s Lost and Found Sound series brought together radio producers, artists, historians, archivists, and the public broadcasting community to collect and preserve audio traces of the World Trade Center, its neighborhood, and the events of September 11th. The Sonic Memorial Project launched a toll-free telephone line and asked the general public to record stories and make audio contributions. The result is a collection of nearly 800 first-hand audio recollections and historical audio recordings, among them recordings of weddings atop the World Trade Center, sounds of the Hudson River waterfront, recordings of law offices and cleaning crews at work in the buildings, an interview with the pianist at Windows on the World, and voicemail messages from people who worked in the World Trade Center, including several recorded during the attacks.

Finally, Ground One: Voices from Post-911 Chinatown provides an in-depth portrait of the ways in which the identity of a community, largely neglected by national media following September 11th, has been indelibly shaped by that day. Made possibly through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Archive team partnered with the Museum of Chinese in America, the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, and New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute to conduct 30 interviews with Chinese and Chinese-American citizens of New York’s Chinatown, a community in the shadow of the WTC towers.

We will be merging all of these special collections, some currently saved in different databases, into one unified archive. For now, browse the collections individually to discover some remarkable sights and sounds captured in 2001.

When we launched the Archive in 2002, we could not have imagined how it would grow to become the world’s largest public collection of born-digital materials related to the events of September 11, 2001. At 150,000 items, the Archive is a uniquely rich collection of the feelings, hopes, and fears of Americans and people around the globe as they attempted to process the world-changing events of that late summer morning. Collected materials range from recordings of Manhattan residents’ voice mails on that morning, to drawings of the attacks by children in Los Angeles, to photos of impromptu memorials from around the world.

We also published digital collections shared with the Archive by large organizations such as the Red Cross, the National Guard, the New York Fire Department, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress and smaller groups serving flight attendants, the Chinese community of lower Manhattan, and Arab-American groups.

The September 11 Digital Archive is significant not only because of its contents and use, but also because of the way it was produced. At the time it launched, the Archive was a unique example of how the Internet could be used to collect history from ordinary people, and it has served as a model for countless other digital archives projects. In 2001 most individuals were not regular users of the Web, nor were they as comfortable sharing personal materials online as they are today.

As we approach the 10th anniversary, we will direct our efforts towards preservation. A Saving America’s Treasures (SAT) grant, jointly-administered by the National Park Service and National Endowment for the Humanities, will help pay for our preservation efforts as we transfer the aging collection to the Omeka platform, a more stable and standardized archival system. This is an essential step to making the contents of the Archive more accessible to scholars, students, policy makers, and the general public in the coming years.

We will use this blog to update you on our progress and detail some of the work required to transfer a large digital collection using one data model to another system with a different one. We also plan to highlight some of the collections and items that have intrigued us as we sort through the Archive.

Finally, we are re-opening the collecting portal and want to hear how your life has changed since September 11, 2001. By collecting reflections at this commemorative moment, we hope to further the life of the Archive as one that not only includes the most immediate reactions to the attacks, but also shows change over time as individuals reflect at different points in the post-9/11 world.

When asked what did you do to commemorate the 10th anniversary of September 11th, we hope that includes submitting a quick reflection to the September 11 Digital Archive.