ORLANDO, Fla. – Members of the Parkland Historical Society collected items placed outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after the shooting that killed 17 people, and they did it with the help and guidance of the chief curator at the Orange County Regional History Center.
After the Pulse nightclub shooting, Pam Schwartz had the difficult task of collecting and preserving more than 7,000 artifacts outside the club and items donated from all over the world.
"We haven't been able to keep everything," she said. "Some things were just destroyed by the elements. When you talk about the volume, people saw how much was at the memorials -- double that."
Members of her office are sharing the information they learned. Schwartz spent several days in Parkland recently with its historical society, and still keeps in touch with those in Las Vegas dealing with the aftermath of the 2017 shooting.
Schwartz's project now is creating a "collecting after catastrophe toolkit."
"We're working to create essentially a guide that can be sent to a community for them to have basically a checklist, things to think about, bullet points," she said.
She hopes no community ever needs to use it, but the guide lays out how communities should come up with a plan to preserve these memorials, how to realistically collect those mementos and other questions that may come up.
"Museums often are very used to collecting things from hundreds of years ago, not collecting things that are happening now," she said.
It also will explain what kinds of items can withstand the elements, given the Pulse memorial withstood the Florida sun and all that rain after the shooting.
"There are things we can recommend but we want to be really careful to not change the way communities naturally grieve," she said.
Schwartz hopes to have the toolkit completed within a year.