accounts, emails, images, and other digital materials. It became the Library of Congress' first major digital acquisition. This project inspired the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which collected stories and digital objects related to the Hurricane Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. The center also collaborated with the Jewish Women's Archive on Katrina's Jewish Voices, a virtual archive of stories, images, and reflections about the New Orleans and Gulf Coast Jewish communities before and after Hurricane Katrina. The desire to avoid creating collecting websites from scratch each time a new collecting project began led the center to develop Omeka, which was first released in 2008. It continues to use Omeka to power its collecting projects, including recent projects on the COVID-19 pandemic, Pandemic Religion and Collecting these Times. Software development In 2005, the center began to develop its own free and open-source software. With funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the center developed Zotero, a free browser-based reference management software which is used by academics to read and cite the academic literature. This led to Thomson Reuters, the makers of the commercial reference management software EndNote, suing George Mason University and the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2008; the lawsuit was dismissed in 2009. The IMLS also provided initial funding in 2007 for Omeka, a content management system that uses the Dublin Core metadata standard to build digital collections and publish digital exhibits. With funding from the NEH, the center also built the Scripto and DataScribe transcription modules on top of the Omeka platform. During the 2000s and early 2010s, the center distributed a series of digital tools for historians and teachers, including Web Scrapbook, Survey Builder, Scribe (a note taking application designed with historians in mind), Poll Builder, H-Bot (an automated historical fact finder), and Syllabus Finder, which allowed users to find and compare syllabi from thousands of universities and colleges on any topic, using the Google search engine. By the late 2010s, these tools were largely superseded by other free or freemium software by various corporations so the tools were abandoned. In 2017, with financial support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the center released Tropy, a desktop knowledge organization application to manage and describe photographs of research materials. Starting in 2015, the maintenance and development of center software was shared between RRCHNM and the Corporation for Digital Scholarship (CDS), which is