Four

ot as big a deal as 22 February, but 4 September is still a significant date for Christchurch – the day of the 2010 earthquake that was the start of all the chaos and horror to come (GeoNet announced this morning that they’ve recorded 14859 earthquakes in Canterbury since that first one, 4558 of them over magnitude 3!).  Actually, the date kind of snuck up on us at work this year – it’s been so busy the last few weeks that it wasn’t until our Monday morning meeting when someone noticed that it was all of a sudden September, and that meant the anniversary was only days away.
We wanted to mark the anniversary somehow, so we decided to showcase Digital NZ‘s Sets.  Digital NZ is the digital arm of the National Library, and performs the same role for digital content as the library does for physical books and printed material.  (It’s also what powers our CEISMIC search engine – Digital NZ harvests the metadata (i.e. information about the content – its title, description, what type of file it is, etc) from each of the many partner sites that make up CEISMIC, and feeds that metadata into our central search engine, so when you search for something on CEISMIC you’re actually searching across many different archives, with the results pulled together in one place.  That ability to federate across multiple archives is what gets us a lot of attention from the big overseas archives – we’re doing something quite unique down here in little NZ!).
One of the really cool features of the Digital NZ site is the ability for users to create Sets, which are basically collections of bookmarks to content you found interesting.  You can share your Sets with other users, and people have created some really interesting Sets on all sorts of topics – they’re always worth a browse.
So we decided that each of the team would create a set around the theme of the 4 September earthquake and our memories.  Not everyone got theirs done in time (see above – busy week), but we shared three of them on the CEISMIC blog.
All of which is to say I’ve already spent a lot of this week thinking about my memories of four years ago, so I’m not going to rehash them again here.  But yeah, four years on.  It seems just like yesterday, but it also feels like a lifetime has gone by in those four years.  They’ve been memorable.