Sheila Brennan, Project Manager for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (www.hurricanearchive.org), recently contacted us about featuring A.D. on their site. The HDMB is using electronic media to collect and preserve the stories and digital history of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to enrich the historical record of these storms.

HDMB is the largest free public archive of these storms, with over 25,000 items in its collection. Each object gives readers unmatched perspective into the lives of those who survived, evacuated from, responded to, and began to rebuild after Katrina and Rita. HDMB offers Katrina and Rita survivors a permanent place to leave their memories so that historians will use their stories when writing about these storms in the future.

Needless to say, it was great feather in our cap to be told that our graphic novel is something that historians and researchers in the future would be very interested in reading. We immediately gave them permission.

HDMB still seeks contributions from anyone and is available for everyone to read or browse. First-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, podcasts, and videos are some of the materials being collected. For instance, HDMB is working with bloggers to save their post-Hurricane sites, seeking to archive these digital creations so they are not permanently lost.

The HDMB is a project of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the University of New Orleans in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and other partners. I’ve already used HurricaneArchive.org for image research and fact-checking as I move forward with A.D.

I highly encourage you to explore—and possibly contribute to—its amazing wealth of resources.