Archiving Web coverage of the September attacks

WebArchivist.com and the Library of Congress need YOUR help in archiving how the September attacks and the aftermath were covered on the Web.

My name is Earl Young. I live in Annandale, Virginia. This is a press release.

I am working with www.webarchivist.org - a team archiving Web coverage of the September 11th attacks. It is a joint venture with webarchive.com (part of Alexa), and the Library of Congress. We are requesting publicity for the project.

We've gotten some coverage already. I've included links to several articles by way of establishing that we're legit.

http://www.roguelibrarian.com/ (see section labeled Monday, September 17)

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/newsbursts/0,7407,2813331,00.html

http://websearch.about.com/library/searchtips/bltotd010919.htm

http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/13692.html

Our current site is:

http://www.webarchivist.org

Our primary contacts (the folks who head web.archivist.org) are:

Steven M. Schneider - steve@sunyit.edu (one of the State university of new York campuses)
Kirsten Foot        - kfoot@u.washington.edu (University of Washington)

The pitch is this: People who wish to help download a 200-byte piece of javascript to their browser. It sits in "favorites" (IE) or as a "bookmark" (Netscape).

The user clicks the favorite/bookmark when they are on a page they believe is appropriate to the archive.

A "thank you" message displays and the user is returned to the original page.

No muss, no fuss, and no personal information is forwarded. Clicking sends only the URL and the name of the page to our site. The source for the javascript is visible using "properties".

We have decent coverage of large sites such as the New York Times, MSNBC, Washington Post, and the like. We're especially interested in foreign sites, individual (personal) sites, weblogs, smaller and/or specialized sites (such as a "memorial page" on the site of a car dealer). When in doubt, click and send.

We're dealing with an eroding collection of source material because pages are being erased and/or edited each day. We would appreciate any assistance you could provide in getting the word out that there's a place to send URLs.

Thank you for your time,

Earl Young
ea_young@yahoo.com