September 11 Web Archive

The Library of Congress
MINERVA Web Archiving & Preservation Project
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cocoon/minerva/html/sept11/sept11-about.html


Collection Principles
The September 11 Web Archive is a collection of archived “web expressions” (websites) of individuals, groups, the press and institutions in the United States and from other countries immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The collection consists of over 30,000 websites archived between September 11, 2001 and December 1, 2001. Material was selected by “Recommending Officers in the area, subject, and format divisions of Library Services and the Law Library” of the Library of Congress. Other recommendations were made by individuals from the National Digital Library and WebArchivists.org and the Internet Archive.

Metadata
The collection had two levels of cataloging; bibliographic and descriptive cataloging based on the Metadata Object Descriptive Scheme (MODS). Information that is offered in the MODS records includes: website title, creator or issuing publisher, abstract, capture date, subject (September 11 Terrorist Attacks, Afghan War, and/or Bioterroism), language, and genre (website). Additional metadata includes producer type (what kind of individual, org. or institution is the website associated with; e.g. press, government, public interest group, religious group, etc. and country of origin. The bibliographic metadata is the bibliographical record of the web archive within the Library of Congress Online Catalog. This metadata is intense!

Object Characteristics
The digital objects are websites of a wide variety, some are newspapers, non-profits orgs., even the New York Public Library is part of the archive. Some items address the events of September 11 and some reference the event. For example, on Sept.19th the NYPL listed the branches that were set to reopen that day. I even found a former employer, American Non-Smokers’ Rights, an advocacy group dedicated to passing smoking ordinances archived from Oct. 9th through December 17th. Wayback Machine (by Internet Archive) is used to view the collection.

Intended Audience
Everyone can enjoy this archive. 9/11 is very much a part of recent American history and naturally most people are interested. Also, anyone with an interest in archiving and digitization would find this material interesting.