8 Years After Katrina and Rita

I was privileged to be asked to participate in a session organized by Leigh White, Hurricane Katrina: Disaster Recovery and Documentation in Archival Collections, at Society of American Archivists’ Annual Meeting, August 15, 2013 in New Orleans, LA.

I spoke about the work that we did at RRCHNM together with Michael Mizell-Nelson and the University of New Orleans from 2005-2008 to build the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. If you haven’t had a chance on this 8th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina to reflect on those events, please take some time to browse through the collections and through user-contributed stories and images.

One of the highest compliments the project received at the conference came from an archivist who recently relocated to New Orleans who researched Katrina’s and Rita’s impact on the area in HDMB before she arrived in LA. She mentioned that without HDMB she would not have had any sense of the extent of the damage–structural, institutional, emotional– across the region without the Hurricane Archive. We hope this will prove useful for others as time passes.

Below are the slides from my talk: