The Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives Initiative

With a generous grant from the Leon Levy Foundation, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is embarking on a project to establish its first-ever institution-wide digital asset management system (DAMS) that will incorporate digital collections and institutional archives. Formed in the digital age, the Museum’s collection is majority digital and consists of over 50,000 photographs, moving images, audio recordings, and oral histories that document the history of the 1993 and 2001 terrorist attacks. The digital institutional archive documents the history of the Memorial and Museum. The DAMS will enable the Museum to further organize, preserve, and significantly expand access to these materials. This four-year initiative will be transformative by improving internal access to collections and strengthening preservation practices, but also by making these materials accessible to a global audience, including many comparable memorial-making efforts around the world which have sought guidance from the Museum. In addition to the DAMS, the Foundation is supporting two related initiatives to build and expand access to digitized and born-digital collections.

Digitizing the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition Collection

The Leon Levy Foundation is additionally funding the digitization, cataloging, and storage of the Museum’s collection of entries to the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. Launched in 2003, the competition was an open, international process undertaken by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) to solicit designs for a memorial at the World Trade Center site. Approximately 5,000 entries were received in the required format of a 40” x 30” foam core board. The grant will allow each board to be professionally photographed, cataloged in the collections management system, and published to the Museum’s online catalog, Inside the Collection. New storage cabinets will also be purchased to ensure their long-term preservation.