Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and organized jointly by the American Social History Project at CUNY and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, The September 11 Digital Archive contains more the 150,000 items, including “first-hand accounts, emails and other electronic communications, digital photographs and artworks” related to the 9/11 attacks.
By “allowing people to tell their stories, making those stories available to a wide audience,” the Archive provides a historical context to better understand what happened. In addition, historians and archivists are using this digital collection
… as a way of assessing how history is being recorded and preserved in the twenty-first century and as an opportunity to develop free software tools to help historians to do a better job of collecting, preserving, and writing history in the new century. To these ends the Archive has partnered with the Library of Congress, which in September 2003 accepted the Archive into its permanaent collections – an event that both ensured the Archive’s long-term preservation and marked the Library’s first major digital acquisition.