The New York Public Library announced Thursday that it will preserve and eventually make available hundreds of hours of previously unseen first‑person footage documenting the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and their aftermath.
Library officials said a newly donated collection, dubbed the CameraPlanet Archive and contributed by Emmy Award–winning filmmakers Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder, contains roughly 500 hours of dramatic, never‑before‑published video drawn from a larger cache that amounts to more than 1,200 hours of contemporaneous material. The NYPL plans to begin public access to the full archive in 2027, library leadership said.
The footage includes handheld recordings made in the days and weeks after the attacks and captures recovery efforts, damaged infrastructure and other scenes that had not been widely seen. The collection contains images of recovery crews at Ground Zero, smoking rubble, workers attempting to repair a blasted‑out subway tunnel near Cortland Street station, pet rescue missions and a range of public responses, according to library officials and review of clips released to media.
One segment released to The Post and identified by the library as Nighttime Recovery shows smoke rising above the rubble as first responders use heavy machinery and hoses while others watch amid choking haze. Other clips provided to the newspaper show a bomb scare at the Empire State Building on Sept. 12, a light tribute from the Westside Pier and time‑lapse footage of the World Trade Center area at night.
"By preserving these firsthand accounts, we are ensuring that future generations can study Sept. 11 as it was experienced by New Yorkers in real time," Brent Reidy, director of research libraries at the New York Public Library, said in a statement accompanying the donation. Reidy said the library would steward the materials for long‑term preservation and access.
Rosenbaum, one of the donors, framed the archive as a bulwark against misinformation and historical distortion. "At a time when misinformation, denialism, and revisionist history circulate widely, timestamped and contemporaneous video records carry renewed civic importance," he said. "The CameraPlanet Archive is not simply a record of tragedy; it is a safeguard against forgetting and distortion."
The footage was largely recorded on handheld video cameras before the widespread adoption of smartphones, giving researchers and viewers a contemporaneous, ground‑level view of New York in the hours and days after the attacks. Library officials said the material will be cataloged and preserved to support future research, exhibitions and programming.
The NYPL will mark the donation with a screening of Rosenbaum’s film "7 Days in September" on Sept. 11, 2025, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., the library said. The screening is intended to accompany the preservation announcement and preview elements of the CameraPlanet holdings.
Archivists and historians who work with traumatic or traumatic public events have emphasized the research value of primary‑source audiovisual material, noting that candid recordings can reveal details about responses, infrastructure damage and civilian experience that are not always captured in official reports. The NYPL described the CameraPlanet Archive as the largest contemporaneous video collection of Sept. 11 materials known to the institution.
The library has set a timeline for processing and public release that reflects the scale of the collection and the technical work required to stabilize, describe and digitize analog and early digital formats. Brent Reidy said that while portions of the collection will be highlighted in programs and screenings, the full 1,200‑plus hours will not be broadly available until 2027 to allow time for proper preservation and cataloging.
Donors Rosenbaum and Yoder have produced documentaries and news media projects, and their transfer of the CameraPlanet materials to a public research library aims to make the footage available to scholars, journalists and the public under archival conditions. The library’s stewardship will include metadata creation, controlled access policies and conservation work to ensure long‑term usability of the recordings.
Officials said the archive will serve researchers studying the immediate human, infrastructural and civic responses to Sept. 11, as well as educators seeking primary‑source material to support instruction about the events and their aftermath. The NYPL did not provide a detailed schedule for phased releases between now and 2027 but indicated that curated screenings and programmatic use of selected material will accompany the preservation process.
The donation comes nearly a quarter‑century after the attacks and follows other institutional efforts to document and preserve memories of Sept. 11. The NYPL’s announcement underscores an increasing emphasis among libraries, museums and archives on conserving audiovisual primary sources that capture events in real time, and on making those sources available in ways that support rigorous research and public understanding.
Library officials and the donors said the CameraPlanet Archive will strengthen the documentary record of Sept. 11 by providing new visual testimony of the immediate aftermath. The NYPL said it will announce additional public programs and details about access and use policies as preservation work proceeds.