This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] 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. 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