The Pantagraph from Bloomington, Illinois • Page 7

www.pantagraph.com The Pantagraph Sunday, November 4, 2001 A7 Preservationists collecting items related to Sept. 11 4- 1 its-- tin IT' i. rv 7 i' Ti it I- V1 tft A pair of shoes coated with dust and ash was amid candles and flowers on New York's Union Square recently at a memorial for victims of the World Trade Center terrorist ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK Crushed vehicles, tattered photos and scrawled missing persons fliers. Video tributes on the Internet. Desperate pleas recorded on voicemail.

Among the relics of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they are for curators, collectors and scholars the makings of future exhibits and archives. No one really knows what value the physical and digital etchings of these trying days will ultimately have to scholars, but by the time preservationists figure it out, it'll probably be too late. So the current line of thinking goes: Act now; analyze later. "It's better to select materials five or 10 years after events, but in this case, much of it will vanish," said Robert Macdonald, director of the Museum of the City of New York.

The museum and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History convened historians and museum professionals in New York recently and established an online forum to continue discussions. Items the city museum may try to acquire include candles, dried flowers, drawings and fliers left at Union Square and other memorials; family photographs from the desks of the fallen twin towers; and concrete and steel from the buildings. Macdonald said the museum will need permission from families before displaying personal artifacts but it can worry about those details later. Some of the urgency is due to the fleeting nature of electronic artifacts, such as Web pages and broadcast signals. Howard Besser, a professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, notes that in the past, "our world was on paper and paper doesn't go away.

We still find the Dead Sea Scrolls and things from many, many, many years ago." The San Francisco-based Internet Archive project, working with the Library of Congress and other groups, has been making copies of Web sites since Sept. 11, returning once or twice a day to track any changes. Associated Press Debris covered iretrucks and emergency vehicles near the World Trade Center in New York following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. Preservationists are already thinking about what scholars studying the Sept.

11 events might want a generation or two from now and are advising public and private agencies to preserve items such as crushed emergency vehicles. attacks fit into world history? How were relationships with Arab-Americans affected? How did New Yorkers respond? How did the world respond? They'll have many more raw materials than they do from Pearl Harbor and past events. For one thing, more information is generated today. Phone conversations were never retained like e-mail, and photography wasn't as popular among amateurs. The preservation efforts are likely to cost millions of dollars combined, and the city museum has already started raising money for its portion.

Some of the early work is being done by lies too soon, nor wait too long to find items gone forever. Nor does she know how the materials will ultimately be used or stored. "It's like putting a message in a bottle and hoping it lands on a shore at some point," Nelson said. Scholars, one day, may want to look back and ask: How do the Separately, Kahle's Television Archive is digitally storing a week of television broadcasts from 20 stations from around the world, supplementing ongoing television archives at Vanderbilt University and elsewhere. Verizon Communications Inc.

has produced cassette tapes of final voicemail messages left by victims from the hijacked planes and the World Trade Center. Producers of National Public Radio's "Lost arid Found Sound," working with local NPR stations, are soliciting copies from The NPR project's other recordings include the voice of a man who taped his impressions as he got off the subway; the final minutes of a radio station whose transmitter was at the World Trade Center; and a past piano performance at the Windows on the World restaurant. "We're trying to capture not just the lost, but the life, what came before and what an ordinary day might have felt like," said Davia Nelson, one of the producers. The task can be touchy. Nelson doesn't want to disturb fami era The project now has more than 500 million pages from a few thousand sites, including news organizations, corporations, personal journals, memorials and even Islamic groups critical of Americans.

"Historians were limited to a few diaries of the Civil War or a handful of accounts from Pearl Harbor," said Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive. "We have at our fingertips the reactions of thousands and possibly millions of people." Others, like University of Toronto sociology professor Barry Wellman, are hanging on to their e-mail from the week similar to how Americans kept newspapers from the Pearl Harbor attack, discovering them in their attics decades later. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts' Fundraiser for the Normal west Band Program 45 per dozen (prepaid orders only) Pick-up Saturday, November 1 7 Normal West High School 501 N. Parkside Road, Normal NO TICE 8:30 1 I a.m. (new time) Donuts MUST be pkked up by 1 1 a.m.! To order.

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