The library at Washington University in St. Louis is building a digital repository called “Documenting Ferguson.” The collection will provide the community with a space to save the media they’ve captured since the death of Michael Brown.
The online collection is open for anyone to contribute material.The archive will accept photos, audio, video, and written stories.
Shannon Davis is the Digital Projects Librarian at Washington University. She says it’s important to capture this material now before it disappears.
“Since all of these events are being captured on such temporal media you know cell phones and Twitter and blogs and everything, we wanted to make sure that these images aren’t lost,” she said. “So we wanted to create kind of a permanent home for them in this Documenting Ferguson collection.”
Davis says the digital collection will help capture firsthand accounts from the community.
“Those people have really the most important opinions and perspective of what’s going on around them,” she said. “And because it’s just being captured on their cell phones it’s really important that we not lose that firsthand account of what’s going on.”
Materials for the archive can be donated here.