The 500 Hours of 9/11

[TRUTH]

A brown fedora rests abandoned in ground zero dust: owner's fate, unknown. In images shot from space, a plume of smoke rises miles above the World Trade Center. Two workers cling to a scaffold that dangles from an office building beneath the inferno. A handheld video camera, pointing at a north tower in flames, shakily veers to show the second hijacked jet striking the other tower.

Those images, captured largely by amateurs, are moments from more than 500 hours of videos and films, the largest collection of raw visual data from what historians say is the best-documented catastrophe in history. About 1,700 clips from the collection have attracted more than a million hits in the three months since they were put on Google Video.

The 7,000-gigabyte archive was assembled by Steven Rosenbaum, a Manhattan-based documentary producer. In the days after the terrorist attacks, he put up posters and fliers and placed an ad in The Village Voice urgently requesting images that captured the attack, its aftermath and the mood of the city.

Now his collection is the largest asset of his dormant television production company, CameraPlanet, and Mr. Rosenbaum is working out an agreement with the Bank of America, the company's primary lender. He wants to structure a deal with a donor, buyer or partner that would keep the collection from being sold piecemeal, would repay the company's debt of more than $500,000 and would make the videos available to researchers, filmmakers and the public.

As the fifth anniversary of the attack approaches, Mr. Rosenbaum is hardly alone among 9/11 collectors in struggling with financing, and with the need to find a permanent home for a repository and provide greater access to it.

Beyond at least 260 major private and institutional collections, an estimated 100,000 people have squirreled away 9/11 materials. They range from video and document collections to flags, badges, roadside shrines, electronic archives of trade center blogs and even compilations of conspiracy theory materials.

As yet, the logical repository for ground zero materials, the planned World Trade Center memorial and museum, has no place to store them, and it faces a budgetary and leadership crisis as well.

Beyond that, seeming to profit from 9/11 is still taboo. David N. Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's in Manhattan, said his auction house has not been offered Sept. 11 collections to sell.

"Things from that day should be unsalable," he said, "and anything that is ghoulish is beyond the pale."

Among all the archives, Mr. Rosenbaum's video collection may be unique in that it can be sampled by anyone with access to the Web, at www.911archive.net/Google.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/nyregion/30archive.html?ex=130664160 0&en=048c8246c0595e49&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[ian neal]

Try this link

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=9%2F11+cameraplanet

great resource

[andyb]