Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger on the "Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive" from Democracy Now! on Vimeo.

DemocracyNow.org - As the nation prepares to mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a pair of leading Internet archivists are launching an ambitious project called Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive. The online archive catalogs 3,000 hours of domestic and international TV news footage from 20 channels from the week around September 11, 2001. The footage begins within minutes of the attack on the World Trade Center as television stations across the world aired images of raging fires, collapsing buildings, and a terrified public. Anchors struggled to make sense of the shocking images streaming in from the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Television news coverage of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath not only documented one of the most important events in mass memory, but also influenced public perception. The archive was organized by Internet archivists Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger, who are interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! August 24.

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker and founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation. Brewster Kahle is a computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, activist, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance, a group of organizations committed to making a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts.

For the complete transcript, to download the podcast, or for Democracy Now!’s reports on the Sept. 11 attacks and everything that happened afterwards, visit http://democracynow.org/​tags/​

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