NEW YORK (AP) – It started with a debris-clogged paper mask that fell onto the desk of Jan Ramirez on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. A friend had used it to help him breathe while fleeing downtown Manhattan.
“That dust mask is going to be an important artifact some day,” he told Ms. Ramirez.

More than five years later, the mask has become a museum piece and one small part of the largest records trove ever assembled to document an event.

Millions of pieces of paper documenting government investigations, BlackBerry messages written by survivors escaping the twin towers, children’s finger-paintings and family photographs are also part of the archive, stored in many different places including state offices, museums and on the Internet.

Saving all things Sept. 11 was a mission embraced from the time of the attacks by professional archivists and grassroots collectors, helped by live televised images of the event and thousands of Internet communities that followed the aftermath.

“Pearl Harbor, there are only so many pictures of,” said Nancy Shader, regional administrator in New York for the National Archives. “This, as we know, was captured in so many ways.”

Archivists, who immediately set out to compile the most complete picture ever of one historic event, are already planning for decades ahead, trying to figure out how to preserve everything. They shared data with museum officials and individual collectors at a symposium last month.

“Our goal is to make sure we all know who’s got what stuff,” said Kathleen Roe, a New York state archivist who is storing more than 1,000 boxes of government records – such as the 9/11 Commission report – in boxes in Albany.

The state received a grant shortly after the attacks to preserve Sept. 11 history; Ms. Roe said she and other major archivists met in New York two weeks after the terrorist attack to ensure that no piece of paper was discarded. It was the first time archivists had met so early to begin collecting artifacts after an event, she said.

Mary Fetchet saved a 43-second telephone message left on the morning of the attacks by her son, Brad, later killed in the south tower. Brad Fetchet, 24, called his mother after a plane hit the first tower, but before the second plane crashed into his building.

“We’re fine, we’re in World Trade Center Two. I’m obviously alive and well over here, but obviously a pretty scary experience,” Fetchet told his mother.

Mary Fetchet, founding director of the Voices of Sept. 11 family group, says: “I want people 100 years from now to be able to listen to that message.”

The organization, with several thousand members, is dispensing advice to family members about how to preserve audio, videotapes and photographs of their loved ones, as well as important papers, such as condolence letters the president sent to family members.

The group is developing an Internet archive she calls a “living memorial”; it will eventually store commemorative information about all the 2,973 victims, as well as survivors and rescuers. So far, there are Web pages that pay tribute to about 300 victims.

Tom Scheinfeldt, a history professor at George Mason University, is one of the coordinators of the 9/11 Digital Archive, which stores 150,000 items including paper, audio and photographs relating to the attacks.

Included in the archive are e-mail transcripts of survivors who typed as they fled the towers, and the heart-rate monitor readout of a jogger who crossed the Brooklyn Bridge as he saw a hijacked jet crash into the north tower, causing his heart rate to spike.

The Associated Press has saved two full boxes of the paper printout of the AP’s national wire on Sept. 11-12, 2001, as well as oral histories from several reporters and photographers, said Valerie Komor of the AP Corporate Archives.

And then there’s Michael Ragsdale, a Columbia University senior technician who roamed the city for more than a year collecting “ephemera” like fliers advertising anti-terrorism rallies, blood drives and other public announcements.

He avoided the missing-persons posters that blanketed New York in the months after the attacks.

“I stayed away from the grief,” he said. “I stayed away from the violence on purpose.”

He has thousands of pages of material stored under plastic in 30 3-ring binders and wants to take them on a national bus tour.

A Sept. 11 archive presents unique challenges as well. Government archivists may have to develop vaults to store records, such as those of FBI investigations after the attacks, that would require high-security clearances to access.

Ms. Ramirez – who was at the New-York Historical Society when she first collected her friend’s dust mask and now is the curator of the planned Sept. 11 museum – said the collapse of the twin towers in just seven seconds apiece may have inspired people to save even the smallest remnants of that day.

“There’s a preciousness that comes attached to anything left concrete from this event,” she said. “I think people seem to feel that it was sort of almost this sacred stewardship they have taken on in holding this material.”

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On the Net:

World Trade Center Memorial Foundation: http://www.buildthememorial.org

Voices of Sept 11 family Web site: http://www.911livingmemorial.org

Sept 11 digital archive: http://www.911digitalarchive.org

New York State 9/11 archives: http://www.nyshrab.org/wtc/s_wtc_projects.shtml