The School of Information Recovery Project

After the devastation of New Orleans by hurricane Katrina, a few students here tossed around the idea of helping out where we could. A few days into our informal chats, Rebecca Carter, and I, Kyle Conner decided to act on our desire to help. We applied to the Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning (http://www.umich.edu/%7Emserve) for project funding to send 4 graduate students from the School of Information (http://www.si.umich.edu) at the University of Michigan to New Orleans to help out.

We designed a project to spend about one week over our winter break to volunteer in museums, galleries, or archival organizations to help recover damaged records. This student-designed project has been helped along by the guidance of the CIC, the UM chapter of the Society of American Archivists (http://www.si.umich.edu/SAA) and by a professor. We received word last Friday, Sept 30, of the approval of our project and the award of $500 to our project.

This blog has been set up to record and document our project's ascension from now through our project's fruition and results. Stay tuned to hear more as we work to receive more funding to implement our plans and activity in New Orleans.

-Kyle