UC Santa Barbara Library

When tragedy strikes your community, few people think about preserving the objects associated with the social mourning process.  This paper discusses a project to document our community’s response to a mass murder.  It describes how we collected and organized materials from spontaneous memorials to make them accessible to scholars in the future.  Material culture is not just the realm of archaeologists; it is also the domain of librarians, archivists, curators and historians.  Our project demonstrates how a campus community can work together to preserve materials that tell the story of such an event and those who were affected by it.