Request from the SAA Tragedy Response Initiative Task Force

The Tragedy Response Initiative Task Force for the Society of American Archivists is requesting your help to provide examples of collecting responses to tragic events. The members of the Task Force are working hard to compile examples and draft templates to be widely shared and want to ensure that we are on the right track to provide applicable resources to a wide range of potential responses to tragedy.

If your community, museum, library, organization, or repository has responded to a tragedy by preserving physical and/or digital material, we would like to hear from you. To help facilitate further documentation sharing, here is a list of current templates we are drafting specific to collections documenting tragedy. We welcome suggested additions to this list as well as any examples your community or institution would be willing to share.

To share your additions, examples, comment, or ask questions, please email Task Force Chair, Lisa Calahan. Comments may also be submitted at the bottom of this page by clicking “Add new comment.”

For those of you not familiar with the Task Force, the Tragedy Response Initiative Task Force is a Society of American Archivists appointed task force charged with creating and compiling best practices and policy documentation regarding archiving the outcome of tragic events (both human caused and natural disasters that result in the loss of life). Our goal is to create resources that will be applicable to as many allied professions and colleagues as possible.

Thank you in advance and on behalf of the Tragedy Response Task Force,

Lisa Calahan
lcalahan@umn.edu
651.626.2531