Voices of History in the Present Tense:
Graduate Center 9/11 Digital Archive

In a 21st-century approach to recording and preserving history, the Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center is creating a permanent 9/11 Digital Archive of first-hand accounts of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. The online archive will allow site visitors to contribute their stories.

The archive will help provide a legacy of personal expression, a historical context for understanding the events, and a model for new applications of digital technology in the work of historians and archivists. It is hoped that creating the 9/11 Digital Archive will generate new software tools to help historians collect, preserve, and write history in the new century. Officially open on March 11, the site can be found at http:// 911digitalarchive.org. In addition to traditional narratives, the first-hand accounts will include such new media as emails, digital images, streaming video and audio, and links to other sites offering information and views about 9/11.

Other significant Web-based resources related to the attacks will be organized and annotated, and the Digital Archive will also back-up other ephemeral material, such as unmaintained Web sites produced in immediately after 9/11.

The 911 Digital Archive is funded by a $700,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (established in 1934 by the then president and CEO of General Motors), to be divided between the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the Graduate Center and its collaborator on this and other projects, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia.