The seminar began with Feng Huiling’s warm welcome speech to Ben, also stressing the importance of preserving memory by digitization in the 21st century. Next, Ben gave a short lecture on American social history, introducing the topic with Henry Ford and his famous museum, showing how people in the 20th century worked hard to record their history. However, Ben stated, what we should do now is to explore how to apply the good ideas of the 20th century to the preservation of our memory today, taking full advantage of the fast-developing technologies of the 21st century.

　　To give the seminar audience a better idea on how Queens College is striving to achieve this goal, Ben gave a brief introduction to the three social history projects of the College: the Rare Book Digital Library, the Digital Occupy Project and the Queens Memory Project. All three projects are aimed to preserve the history of Queens, using the newest technology and trying out creative ideas. Within these ground-breaking projects, the Queens Memory Project was the main topic of the seminar. The widely known project has attracted much attention and interest both in the US and in China since its launch in 2010.

　　The seminar moved on to the Q&A session, focusing on questions regarding many aspects of the Queens Memory Project. The questions included how did project began at first,what are the basic aims of the project, what materials does the project collect and how to organize and display them, how does the public use the materials, how to attract more involvement and promote collaboration in building such projects, the future plans of the project, and much more. Ben answered each and every one of the questions in detail, giving plenty of background information and many new insights. Faculty members and students listened with full attention and interest, giving comments and asking new questions during the session. After nearly two hours of deep discussion, the seminar came to an end with both Ben and SIRM expressing the intention of establishing a collaboration plan to involve more students and teachers into the Queens Memory Project in the near future.

The seminar ended with the exchanging of gifts between Ben and Prof. Zhang Bin. The friendship between Queens and SIRM will surely be strengthened furthermore by the ever-growing communication and collaboration of both sides in the future.