The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank is an archive conceived of for "Collecting and Preserving the Stories of Katrina and Rita." The project was organized by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and UNO, and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The collection contains over 25,000 items, all contributed by visitors to the site - "survivors, first responders, relief workers, family, friends..." This pretty much sums up the collection principles: whatever people who experienced the storm felt was relevant to post. While this archive contains personal stories, I will focus on the photographs that contributors have posted to the site.
Object Characteristics
All digital images were, presumably, taken on personal cameras, thus the quality varies greatly. On the whole, I would say the quality is pretty good- certainly equal to Flickr, or another social networking/photo share type site.
Metadata
Due to the nature of this site, there is unsurprisingly little metadata. Anything entered was the choice of the contributor except for a small amount of generated data: and object number, date and time. Of interest, though, is the use of tags on this site - while I wasn't able to find the neighborhood I lived in, the place I worked, or the school I went to (which surprised me!), I did find some familiar faces and places.
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