Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory

Abstract

On September 11, 2001, terrorists attacked the United States, an event that proved to be a watershed moment for the country. Much has been written and discussed about the impact of that day. Many of the smaller, more intimate details that we know about that event are still freely available on the internet due to the tireless efforts of various “memory institutions” that took action to preserve every moment possible, providing historians with a deeper insight into a singular event than had previously been thought possible. This was also confirmation of a five-year-long ongoing concern that information on the internet might be lost forever