We are working with The Internet Archive (archive.org) and the Library of Congress to build an archive of the emerging web sphere related to the September 11 Terrorist Attack.

As hundreds (thousands?) of web sites around the world react to these events, we think it is critical to identify, archive and annotate these sites and pages. We're interested in finding as much web content as possible, from as many different sites and different countries as possible. Everything is of interest, especially those sites not likely to be picked up by search engines or web crawlers (like individual's pages with links sent via email).

This archive will be made available to the public in a way similar to the Election Collection 2000 [http://archive0.alexa.com/collections/e2k.html].

To get this effort moving, we have quickly together a *very simple* web site at a new site, http://webarchivist.org. If you're interested, visit that site, and follow the (hopefully) simple directions. Basically, what we're asking is that you click on a special link (that you install on your browser) whenever you are visiting a site that you think should be archived. Clicking on the link will alert our system to archive that site immediately. If you're up for it, you can also get a tool that allows you to fill out a 3-question "site coding sheet", identifying the type of site producer, the kinds of activities available on the site, and an open-ended assessment of the site.

We hope you'll join us in this important activity. We'll try to have some preliminary results of the effort available by the time of the AOIR conference next month.