Crisis Events Digital Library

Abstract

The Crisis Events Web pages Digital Library is a locally hosted web application designed to collect, organize, and visualize user-submitted information about crisis events across the United States. Each event is modeled as a digital object containing structured metadata—location (latitude/longitude and municipality), date and time, event types such as wildfire, tornado, and flood, casualty figures, economic impact estimates, and a descriptive narrative. The system allows the users to take events of similar crises such as two cases of fires or two cases of tornadoes and view side-by-side charts and tables that illustrate differences in incident date, duration, death toll, property damage, and other key metrics. On the frontend, the application uses React with React Router and Tailwind CSS to deliver a responsive and easy to use interface. The backend was made using Spring Boot as it supports data storage, API services, and user authentication. A key feature of the system is the ability to allow users to upload their urls regarding the crisis events, as well as the data regarding the event mentioned prior, and the database will store it for later viewing and comparing. This project was completed as part of the CS 4624 Spring 2025 curriculum at Virginia Tech, with the goal of supporting future academic research, enhancing public awareness of historical and contemporary crises, and contributing to the digital archiving of major U.S. events. The platform showcases the integration of multimedia access, information retrieval, and interactive visualization in a real-world application.