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I first met Roy Rosenzweig at a 1999 conference sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at Stanford University organized by David Kirsch and Timothy Lenoir about use of websites to capture recent history of science and technology. I believe the link was James T. Sparrow, who pioneered websites on the New York City blackouts of 1965 and 1977 while still a history graduate student at Brown University (http://sloan.stanford.edu/InfoBlackout.htm; http://blackout.gmu.edu/). Roy recruited Jim to the Center for History and the New Media about that time. David had developed a site about the history of electric vehicles ( http://sloan.stanford.edu/InfoEV.htm), while Tim had a site about the history of the computer mouse (http://sloan.stanford.edu/InfoMouse.htm). Only eight years ago creating history on the web was radical and indeed very hard, as such early sites show. The breadth and depth of Roy’s vision for history and the new media elevated the Stanford conference, which assembled scattered, lonely and even clandestine practitioners. Roy saw that new kinds of history could be created and communicated, and that some strong institutions were needed to improve and spread the practice and to spur preservation and access. After the conference, Sloan invited a proposal from George Mason to expand CHNM’s work into history of science and technology. Roy submitted a characteristically first-class proposal, which won support within only a couple of months of submission. Roy, always expanding, assimilated historian of science Daniel Cohen and the Exploring and Collecting History Online (ECHO http://echo.gmu.edu/) project – Science, Technology, and Industry took off.

A few days after 9/11 Sloan Foundation staff members were considering ways that Sloan-supported activities might help improve matters in New York and Washington DC. I contacted Roy, and before September was over he visited the Foundation offices in Rockefeller Center together with GMU colleagues and also counterparts from City University of New York. Roy appreciated instantly that the software and techniques developed for ECHO might apply to 9/11 and its aftermath. Within weeks, sites were established to collect, preserve, and present the history of 9/11 (http://911digitalarchive.org/). While already building the sites and collecting materials, Roy prepared another first-class proposal, which the Sloan Foundation trustees immediately supported. Less than two years later, in September 2003, the Library of Congress would accept the 9/11 Digital Archive into its collections, an event that both ensured the Archive's long-term preservation and marked the Library's first major digital acquisition. The Sloan story repeated in 2005 after Katrina and Rita with the creation of the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (http://www.hurricanearchive.org/). Meanwhile, Roy had further built the CHNM team with Tom Scheinfeldt, Josh Greenberg, and other excellent recruits.

During the eight years or so that I knew Roy, he expanded, with excellence, in all directions: into history of science and technology, into contemporary history, into new technologies, into the heart of the historical profession, out to the expert amateurs and enthusiasts, into the Library of Congress, Internet Archive, and other archives, into bookstores, and onto desktops, within George Mason University and in networks covering the USA. Helping provide support was a pleasure, and my main concern was to minimize his chores with regard to funding, so he and his colleagues could get on with their very worthy work. Fast, smart growth of imaginative historical practice is what I will always associate with Roy.

Jesse Ausubel, program director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation