(First, it is nice to have SSJ back up again. Second, I'm forwarding this worthwhile initiative.)

Dear RI Friends and Associates,

We hope that you and your family, friends, and colleagues are safe after the recent tragic events in Japan. Last week was terrible, and we hope each week brings northern Japan closer to recovery and normalcy.

The Reischauer Institute is part of a growing effort to record and archive the communications after, and responses to, the disaster. We are working quickly to set up a data archiving project that will capture and store the numerous forms of electronic communication that occurred in the immediate aftermath as well as the longer term.

As a first step to archiving social media and other possibly ephemeral documents, we have established the email address "daishinsai-archive@fas.harvard.edu"which will collect relevant email correspondence (such as reports circulated by people in affected areas of Japan), web links, videos, or digital images. If you would like contribute materials to this archive, please email them to daishinsai-archive@fas.harvard.edu, and include as much contextual information as possible (e.g., who created the record, when, where, and so forth).

Due to the high volume of submissions, we cannot respond to these contributions individually.

We will be working to make as much of this information available to the scholarly community, for immediate and longer-term analysis of the disasters and their aftermaths.

As soon as possible, we will be distributing more information about the archiving efforts on which we are embarking. If you know of any other similar efforts, please let us know so that we can coordinate with other organizations, rather than duplicate efforts.

The project is being led and supervised by Professors Theodore C. Bestor, Andrew Gordon, and Helen Hardacre.

We are working with various programs at Harvard, including the GIS Center, the MegaLab, and the Harvard College Libraries, and are collaborating with NCC (North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources), the listserver EASIANTH, and other networks.

Please accept our gratitude in advance for your support of this project.

Best regards,

--Ted Gilman

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Theodore J. Gilman, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies Harvard University 1730 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
TEL: 617-495-3220
FAX: 617-496-8083
tgilman@fas.harvard.edu
www.fas.harvard.edu/~rijs/
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