Friday, August 28, 2015

Documenting Ferguson: Building a community digital repository

Presented at Washington University in St. Louis on August 13, 2015. The August 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, along with other recent police-involved shootings around the country have inspired demonstrations, conversation, debate and calls for systemic change in our society. Soon after Brown’s shooting, Washington University Libraries and other St. Louis cultural heritage institutions established a repository to document events in or inspired by Ferguson. Appropriately named Documenting Ferguson, this community-sourced open repository now has more than 1,500 files of digital photographs, video recordings and other media contributed from all over the country. These are viewable online at http://digital.wustl.edu/ferguson.