War And Remembrance

If news is the first draft of history, then the Television Archive is history in the making. The nonprofit research center has stockpiled television news footage from Sept. 11 -- everything from Good Morning America to Iraq Satellite Channel -- and made it publicly accessible at TVarchive.org. ''We have 300 hours of TV from Iran, Palestine, Qatar, China, Russia, and Japan,'' says Brewster Kahle, a director of the Television Archive and the Web-related Internet Archive. While Kahle envisions these sites as a resource for scholars, the latter is now aiding the Library of Congress with a new site, September11.archive.org, and is in talks with the Smithsonian about a future exhibit. The undertaking is in its infancy (foreign-language experts have yet to translate the overseas broadcasts), but Kahle sees the project as a way to understand how others viewed the tragedy of Sept. 11: ''We need to ask the question: What did the world see?''