In response to recent historic events taking place in the Saint Louis metropolitan area, Washington University Libraries in collaboration with campus partners in the Center for the Humanities and the Center for Diversity and Inclusion have created a unique opportunity for sharing user-created content documenting the events in and around Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing by a local policeman of 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. The goal of this project—called Documenting Ferguson—is to preserve community and media-generated original content, thereby creating a resource of diverse perspectives that is freely accessible for students, scholars, teachers, and the greater community.
The Libraries are participating in a related collaboration with the Internet Archive’s content capture service Archive-It. Through this project, the Libraries will help document the web presence that has been created following Brown’s death, in response to events in Ferguson. The project will archive websites that detail community response as well as archiving internet resources like blogs, news sites, and social media.
Crowd-sourced information is and will continue to be very important to the efforts to build content. Community participants and media representatives are invited to contribute digital content of which they have clear ownership, such as images, video, audio, and stories related to memorials, community meetings, rallies, and protests occurring in Ferguson and the surrounding St. Louis County and City.
Questions about the projects or contributing content to either Documenting Ferguson or Archive-It, contact Shannon Davis, digital projects librarian at ssdavis@wustl.edu or Jennifer Kirmer, digital archivist at jennifer.kirmer@wustl.edu.
To learn more about these initiatives please go to digital.wustl.edu/ferguson/ and digital.wustl.edu/ferguson/webcontent.html .