ReadWriteWeb

As the 10 year anniversary of the terrorist attack that brought down New York's World Trade Center approaches, there are many opportunities to comb through the wreckage of national consciousness, courtesy of both news and social media. Among the most complete is Understanding 9/11, an Internet Archive project to collect all broadcast coverage of the event.

Whether you were all the way across the country as I was or in the neighborhood, you have, no doubt, very strong feelings about the event and may want to memorialize it somehow. But reabsorbing the terrible images seems almost unwholesome to me, personally. Do it if you want, if you think it will benefit you, but watch out. An alternative might be Broadcastr's September 11 Memorial. Here you can bear witness, in person or via telephone and your testimony will become part of the historical record.

Rag trade blog Fashionista reports that Vogue's stealth website, currently under development for a December launch, will feature a digital version of every single number published since Arthur Baldwin Turnure started the magazine in the late 19th century.

If you are a fan of fashion, this is huge news. If you're not, it's huge news. History is more than big decisions made by bigwigs in big buildings. It's how we think, eat, buy, sing, move and dress. Vogue is, for better or worse, a prominent lens onto a substantial segment of our cultural mores. Not to mention, it helps to bring history alive when you can picture the details. Now there will be an archive of the sartorial side of those details.

Do you know this man? The folks at Lost Films hope that you do and that you can identify the name of the film from which the still was taken. Archivists know it's a German film, and they believe it was made in the 1930s. And they're asking for anyone with more information to help.

The fact that the British Library purchased the archive of poet Wendy Cope (yes, that Wendy Cope) is not all that unusual. Keeping a record of the development of its poets is part of its mission. (I saw a draft of Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" with Siegfried Sasson's notes on it at the BL!) The unusual aspect is the predominance of email.

"'Retrieved from the cloud,' the collection of approximately 40,000 emails dating from 2004 to the present," the Library said in a statement, "is the most substantial in a literary archive acquired by the British Library to date, affording among other things a fascinating and extensive insight into writerly networks."

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has joined forces with crowdsourcing document outfit Scripto , open source document transcription tool, to transcribe and share a piece of U.S. history thought to be lost.

The project "Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800" seeks to transcribe and digitize copies of papers from a formative part of American history, previously thought to be lost to fire. Projects like these rarely suffer from a surfeit of funding, so using Scripto to coordinate a crowdsourced transcription has made the project possible.

The National Library of Finland has launched a new program to support the digitization efforts of its archives. The project, Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers), blends microtasks, crowdsourcing, and video games to break up and distribute some of the dull repetitive work of verifying digitized records.

"We have millions and millions of pages of historically and culturally valuable magazines, newspapers and journals online. The challenge is that the optical character recognition often contains errors and omissions, which hamper for example searches," says Kai Ekholm, Director of the National Library of Finland. "Manual correction is needed to weed out these mistakes so that the texts become machine readable, enabling scholars and archivists to search the material for the information they need."

Under the auspices of the Smithsonian, the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions has been digitizing and "databasing" the contents of ancient medical treatises for decades. Having done so, they were well positioned to help scholars understand the discovery of a lifetime: 2,000-year-old pills found in a shipwreck, the only ancient medicines ever discovered intact.

The Roman ship, excavated in Tuscany's Bay of Baratti in the Eighties, contained a host of medical implements, including 136 boxwood vials and tin containers. One of the latter was recently found to contain pills and those pills were in tact, the metal having held the water off for over 20 centuries.

"Technology is the equalizer," Fareed Zein told Fast Company. Zein has built the Sudan Vote Monitor as a platform people can use to monitor and cover next month's independence vote in that northeastern African country.

To the south and east, another technological experiment has risen, that one to commemorate the fait accompli of the Rwandan genocide. The Genocide Archive of Rwanda, hosted by the Kigali Genocide Memorial, will document the 100 days and 800,000 lives lost in the brutality of 1994.

Twitter lists are a beautiful thing, a great way to gather together expert opinion on any topic. If you thought Twitter's own search was bad at retrieving archival conversations, though, is archival search of Twitter lists too much to dream of?

It may not be anymore, thanks to a startup called Nsyght. Nsyght has been around for a few years now, and it does a whole lot of things for and beyond Twitter, but the service's newest feature is what really moves the needle for me: The ability to filter and search the archives of the lists of people I'm following. I can see what Chris Grayson's Augmented Reality Peeps list has said about Google over the past few months, or what the members of the Enterprise Irregulars said about the much-tweeted #Workday analyst demo event earlier this week. Hello, useful!

Historical records are hard to look through casually. One solution is being explored in the case of Supreme Court justice nominee Elena Kagan's archive of emails sent while working under the Clinton administration. That body of data is now available in a Web-based interface that looks a lot like Gmail and is open to full-text search, thanks to the watchdog Sunlight Foundation.

Elena's Inbox is a thought-provoking project that could inspire future efforts to facilitate citizen evaluation of public records, and the Sunlight Foundation has open-sourced the code used to build it. As it stands, the microsite is a fun and interesting peek inside the Clinton administration's day-to-day operations. It's hard to imagine any previous political nominee facing this degree of public transparency.