Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: Collecting and Preserving the Stories of Katrina and Rita

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: Collecting and Preserving the Stories of Katrina and Rita



Given last week's discussion over the specific terms that we are dealing with in in this class, I'm not sure if the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank project qualifies as digital curation per se, but the methodology and approach that they are using is so innovative and cutting edge and wields a lot of potential for future scholarly communication that I had to devote a blog entry on it.

The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank is a digital archive, part of the Center for History and New Media, devoted to gathering and preserving the stories of people who experienced Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. They have an image archive, scans of things that people have written, typewritten accounts that are named, dated and provide locations to where things are. People are allowed to contribute to the memory back by uploading their personal pictures and adding their accounts. There is also a map of the areas that were affected by Katrina and Rita and it is interactive and searchable.

I felt that this Hurricane Memory Bank with its openess and interactivity and using media in such a way to allow the preservation of voices and personal accounts showcases the possibilities of exactly how digitization can influence the historical record. Our discussions on the future of scholarly communication and digital curation center around grappling with trying to picture the future and what it will look like and the problems and solutions that we might face as information professionals in a digital world. Frankly, after I browsed through the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, I got excited about how we are able to capture individual voices and make history way more tangible by archiving these records.