New Zealand has launched an innovative project to create disaster memory archives after its recent earthquakes, including the events that wreaked havoc in Christchurch between September 2010 and June 2011. There’s indication that the oral histories, photographs, memoirs, and collections of online documents and mementos will not only record the event, but also help people heal.

“Whenever I go down to Christchurch, or talk to Christchurch friends, they always say they are getting on with their lives and don't think about the earthquake so much now, but as soon as I open up the topic, half an hour later they're still talking about it,” Jamie Mackay, a Web team leader for QuakeStories, told New Zealand’s The Press. “I think it's just tapping into that somehow and getting people to get over the hurdle of actually writing it down.”

QuakeStories, which allows people to share their quake experiences online, is a project of New Zealand’s Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Other archives include an oral history project that will be available at the National Library of New Zealand and a photograph collection that will eventually be online in the library’s Timeframes catalog, but which can be viewed now in photographer Ross Becker’s Web album.

Traditional archives of quake-related objects are also being curated and related websites and social media are being indexed. Eventually all the archives will be consolidated under what’s to be known as the Ceismic consortium. The consortium, based at Canterbury University, will build a database of the human effects of the earthquake.

“We've got all the geotechnical expertise, we've got all the engineering expertise, but the quakes are primarily about the impact on people,” said Paul Millar, an arts professor who helped conceptualize the idea. “I thought it would be important to record people's stories and to capture as many media files as possible and also chart the process of the recovery. Do longitudinal studies, keep going back to people and find out how they are getting on. Chart patterns of migration and do geospatial mapping.”

Although the Ceismic concept is based on projects like the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, its breadth, organization, and timing are unique. In a way, Millar notes, the ravaged city is the perfect place to pull off such a project and have it work well.

“Christchurch is in a very geographically defined area,” he said. “We're relatively First World so we have a high technology uptake. The impact has gone across all the social strata. We're a very unfortunate ideal test case.”