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How the Net Is Documenting a Watershed Moment

October 15, 2001

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL




As the nation's cultural institutions start to ponder what
they will collect and preserve from the events of Sept. 11,
the Internet is figuring largely in their strategies.

Information from the Internet is being continually
collected in a major undertaking spearheaded by the Library
of Congress. A new Internet site, September11.archive.org,
went online on Thursday and already contains more than
500,000 Internet pages related to the terrorist attacks and
the United States reprisals, ranging from daily news
reports to personal memorials.

In a separate initiative, an informal coalition of 33
organizations led by the Museum of the City of New York and
the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History,
plans this week to begin using an online forum to discuss
and coordinate the collection of Sept. 11 materials. The
effort may eventually lead to a joint Internet site
exhibiting digital versions of their artifacts.

"Historians are very good at looking back, but looking
forward is a little bit tough," said Robert R. Macdonald,
director of the Museum of the City of New York. "We're
trying to decide what we owe history. We have to come to
some decision-making in terms of what should be collected."


For Diane Kresh, the director of the Library of Congress's
public- service collections, the Internet provides source
materials that belong in the library, especially as a
document of a watershed moment that is still occurring.
"The Internet has become for many the public commons, a
place where they can come together and talk," Ms. Kresh
said. "And you continue having that interaction with other
people long after you've stopped reading the daily news
story or seeing the nightly newscast, so it has a kind of
continuum experience that other media don't have."

Every conceivable corner of the Internet is jammed with
reactions to the attacks, and September11.archive.org is an
attempt to corral the Net's wildly diverse contents into a
central research repository. The project is a collaboration
among the Library of Congress; the nonprofit Internet
Archive, which is building a vast digital library at
archive.org; and webArchivist.org, an academic research
project financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The library's two partners began making digital copies of
news sites and pertinent Internet pages within hours of the
attacks. On Sept. 12 curators, reference specialists and
language experts at the library drafted an initial list of
150 sites that were to be archived regularly, a roster that
has since grown to 1,100 entries. A form was also put on
webArchivist .org so anyone could submit links.

Now that the archive has opened, visitors can search its
contents by date or a keyword like "tragedy." In addition
to international news, local- government and personal
tribute sites, the archive is likely to store pages from
jihad-themed sites that have since been taken offline.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, justified
that potentially controversial decision: "What's the role
of a library in a time like this? I think it's to be an
unbiased sanctuary for real research."

Although the archive is still being compiled, Mr. Kahle
insisted that the site be opened now to the public. "What
you will see is not what any librarians would smile at," he
said. "The collection will have holes in it. One of the
reasons to get it out there quickly is so people can say,
`You're missing this.' "

The creators of the archive are developing a "Webscape"
feature that, by the end of the month, should enable
visitors to assemble an annotated list of select pages -
for instance, the most poignant fire department memorial
sites - and share it with friends via e-mail. Steven M.
Schneider, co-director of webArchivist.org and a
political-science teacher at the SUNY Institute of
Technology at Utica/Rome, said, "I think of the archive as
a canvas, and I want to give people the tools to paint
their impressions."

Ms. Kresh said she did not know how much longer that
archive data would be collected, but "at this point, there
is no end in sight." And when the process is done, she
said, the archive might reside in the library's "American
Memory" collection of online historic resources at www.loc
.gov, next to digitized copies of Sunday-school books and
Civil War memorabilia. The library is also collecting oral
histories of Sept. 11 on audio cassettes, but it has yet to
decide whether those will be put online.

Just who is collecting what is of great concern to Mr.
Macdonald of the Museum of the City of New York. From
mayoral papers to fliers of the missing, the artifacts from
this event will be of potential interest to historians, he
said, and "it would be unfortunate if museums, libraries
and archives viewed this as a competition."

In part to raise this issue, Mr. Macdonald and his
Smithsonian counterparts met on Oct. 4 with 70
representatives from history oriented organizations,
including the New-York Historical Society, the New York
City Fire Museum, the Municipal Archives and the Lower East
Side Tenement Museum.

With so many parties involved, the best medium for
communication is the Net. An electronic mailing list is
being set up so the players can trade notes.

Although the electronic discussions will be private,
excerpts are to be publicly posted on a soon-to-open
Internet site, 911history.net. This site will also permit
visitors to contribute artifacts.

If all goes well, it is possible that the organizations
will jointly produce, in time for the first anniversary of
the attacks, an Internet site where their different
collections can be communally exhibited.

Both Mr. Macdonald and Ms. Kresh acknowledged that their
endeavors provided a way to cope with the tragedy. Mr.
Macdonald said the New York meeting with his peers was
therapeutic, and Ms. Kresh said mounting the $100,000
archiving project was "also a way to work through it
emotionally and intellectually."

David Silver, director of the Resource Center for
Cyberculture Studies at the University of Washington, said:
"As we go online more and more, elements of our everyday
lives also go online. We see thousands of people waving
flags in a park and we see protests, but a lot of this
action is also online. It's important to capture this
historical moment."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/15/arts/15ARTS.html?ex=1004190812&ei=1&en=2ae42345ae5682d6



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