(22 Sep 2021) On the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Tracee Haupt, a Digital Collection Specialist in the Digital Content Management section at the Library of Congress, asked four individuals who were part of the creation of the September 11, 2001 Web Archive to reflect on their experience documenting the tragedy and the unique contents of the collection. In addition to the archive’s historical significance as a record of how a variety of individuals and organizations responded to September 11th, the collection is also important as an example of an early web archiving project, when both the internet and the Library of Congress’ (LC) efforts to preserve it were still relatively new. In this post, current and former Library employees describe how the collection came to be, what they learned while creating it, and why preserving this aspect of internet history was crucial to fully understanding the impact of September 11th.
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