BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Virginia Tech's Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) is pleased to announce the launch of the April 16 Archive (www.april16archive.org). This new online archive assists artists, humanists, social scientists, and all other scholars who seek, today and in the future, to develop a better understanding of the violent events of April 16, 2007 at Virginia Tech.

It is also available to the general public of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the United States of America, and the world at large as we come to terms with a local, national, and global event that will have ramifications for years to come.

This archive works actively to deploy electronic media for the collection, interpretation, preservation, and display of stories and digital objects related to the tragedy of April 16, 2007 and its many effects as text, image, and sound.

Developed in cooperation with George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (CHNM), this project is receiving technical, curatorial and administrative support from Virginia Tech students, faculty, and staff.

The archive will preserve a diverse record of the events surrounding April 16, 2007 by collecting first-hand observations, photographic images, sound recordings, media reports, personal writings, official statements, individual blog postings, and any other documents that can be stored as digital files.

In addition to local reactions, the archive welcomes responses from across the globe in any language. Through this archive, we aim to leave a positive legacy for the larger community and contribute to a collective process of healing, especially as those affected by this tragedy tell their stories in their own words.

The larger trend exemplified by this project is the"digital memory bank." Memory banks are being used to preserve the richness of the present as it transitions to the past, thereby ensuring that the collected records can be both readily accessible and carefully preserved for future access.

The April 16 Archive welcomes contributions from the Virginia Tech community, as well as from anyone around the world who wants to share words of support or reflection following the events of April 16, 2007. The attacks happened in Blacksburg, Virginia, but they were experienced around the world through mass media and community ties.

The accounts of that day from any site across the globe are, therefore, very important to the April 16 Archive as it documents the full impact of this tragic event.

For more information, visit http://www.april16archive.org or contact admin@april16archive.org. For media inquiries, contact Brent Jesiek, Manager of the CDDC, at (540) 231-7614 or cddc@vt.edu.

Established in 1998, Virginia Tech's Center for Digital Discourse and Culture is one of the world's first university based digital points-of-publication for new forms of scholarly communication, academic research, and cultural analysis.

Virginia Tech's College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (CLAHS) as well as the Institute of Distance and Distributed Learning (IDDL) actively support the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture. The CDDC is also working with Virginia Tech's newly established Institute for Society, Culture, and the Environment (ISCE) to develop new scholarly initiatives, such as the April 16 Archive, tied into the practices of rhetoric, representation and the public humanities.