Collecting the History of a Calamity: Why Retail Collecting Works When Wholesale Collecting Doesn't

This presentation will highlight the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and its collection of material from the disastrous Gulf hurricane season of 2005. The emphasis of this presentation will not be on the hurricanes themselves, but rather on how difficult it was to build a large and varied collection of material about the hurricanes and their aftermath. Particular emphasis will be placed on how the historians involved in the project had to rely on a variety of what might best be called "retail collecting" techniques to induce contributions to the archive. The lessons learned from these efforts can be useful for those attempting to build similarly large collections of public history material.