Hancock County Library System and Waveland’s Ground Zero Hurricane Museum partner for digital collections

HCLS is excited to embark on a new partnership with Waveland’s Lili Stahler-Murphy Ground Zero Hurricane Museum.  Both organizations recently agreed to work together on efforts to preserve the history of Hancock County and the Gulf Coast region.  HCLS will be the archival repository for Ground Zero’s digital collections, helping to ensure long-term public access for local history.

Waveland’s Ground Zero Hurricane Museum has partnered with HCLS to collect and preserve the history of Hancock County.

Museum Board President Bernie Cullen remarked on the new partnership:

“It has been a goal of the museum’s board to digitize and archive our collection in order to preserve the history for future generations.  A subsequent goal was to share those archives with community partners and not be the sole location for public access.  This collaboration is ideal to obtain these goals.”

HCLS is also excited to congratulate Ground Zero—which was recently awarded the Mississippi Digital Humanities Hub Digitization Grant!  This grant-funding will provide necessary resources for Ground Zero to digitize a collection of "Dear Santa" letters sent by storm survivors in Waveland post-Katrina.  Ground Zero will also be collecting oral histories from some of the letter writers about their Katrina experiences.  The oral histories and map of the homes referenced in these letters that will be produced from this project will be hosted in HCLS’s digital archives and on interactive digital kiosks at the Ground Zero Hurricane Museum.  This six-month project is slated to be available to view in the summer of 2026.  We are excited to see this project progress and to work with the Ground Zero Museum on this and future projects.

Examples of "Dear Santa" letters in the Ground Zero collection that will be on exhibit at Ground Zero and through HCLS’s digital collections on archive.org.

You can see more of Ground Zero’s archiving projects in our upcoming Hancock Community Archive program series on May 29.  Representatives from Ground Zero will be part of a discussion about the 20th anniversary commemorative project that resulted in the powerful documentary On Call: Katrina’s First Responders. Register to attend this special screening and discussion.