Documenting Current Events

I talked to an alum recently about his involvement with the Occupy movement. He’s been in New York at Zuccotti Park getting involved with the protest movement, though he left before it got too crazy. Now this alum back in town to support Occupy Boston and to inform ENC of the movement, just to keep students in touch with the wider world. There is an excellent website being built over at Occupy Archive that is attempting to document the movement as events unfold. The growth of the web and social media outlets were the groundwork for other projects, such as the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and the September 11 Digital Archive. The Smithsonian sent representatives to various cities to collect ephemera for preservation. The archival world, especially those of us at academic institutions,  has been in discussion about the ability and mission to preserve a movement of ideas that may or may not affect the students of our campus communities. An archive is to always keep historical integrity at its core, as well as think about future researchers who may want to put cultural and social events in context with one another.  So the question for archives is the one of timing. Do we wait and see if our institutions are directly affected by any current movement or idea and then collect materials, or is there a way to play the part of unbiased bystander and document events as they unfold? It is a question I am still exploring, especially in light of the Occupy movement which continues to gain traction.