Highlights Archives
Documenting Disaster Relief
In the days following Hurricane Katrina, federal troops moved into New Orleans to help survivors. The Air Force 4th Air Expeditionary Group quickly turned the city's Louis Armstrong Airport into "Camp Gumbo," the base from which civilians who were stranded, sick or injured by the hurricane could be evacuated. On September 4 a tent city sprouted to house the unit's 900 soldiers, and on September 11 they produced the first issue of what officials hope will be a very short-lived newspaper for the troops stationed there — Gumbo Grapevine.
Three days later the Wisconsin Historical Society's periodicals librarian Jim Danky contacted officials at Camp Gumbo to make sure their camp newspaper will be preserved. The Historical Society's library-archives collection contains the largest collection of U.S. military newspapers in the nation. It is also the only library that comprehensively documents the day-to-day experiences of American service men and women through the pages of the newspapers they read and write themselves. Last year, thanks largely to the efforts of Rep. Tammy Baldwin, the federal government appropriated $50,000 to enable the Society to begin preserving the collection on microfilm and in digital form. This will make it available to researchers at universities, libraries and historical organizations all over the world — and preserve it in a more robust medium than newsprint.
As we all watched the relief efforts take shape in recent weeks, we also heard a broad spectrum of opinion about their effectiveness. When historians come to analyze whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government services responded appropriately, they will consult the information recorded in government publications preserved in research libraries such as the Society. For more than a century, every document made public by federal and state employees has come to the Society or another University of Wisconsin-Madison campus library in order to be preserved for posterity. Fortunately, that official version of events created by the agencies themselves can be supplemented by grassroots publications such as Gumbo Grapevine and other sources produced by the soldiers on the ground.
:: Posted September 16, 2005
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