Bold has been floating the idea of an initiative he believes would better fit the ideals of a movement that was intentionally leaderless. He calls it an anarchive, an archive that would distribute power and responsibility for collecting material among the people. “We cannot possibly capture everything that is being produced in this movement,” he says. “What better way to make the archive accountable to the people then to make the people accountable for the archive?” Everyone in the movement, he says, should be responsible for thinking historically.

John says that the archive project’s leaderless nature means that the movement’s message will be lost in the noise. “If you don’t believe in leaders,” he says, “you might say ‘Oh my God, I have to collect everything.’ ”

For now, that’s exactly what the movement is doing. Shazz Baric—whose legal name is David McNerney—is in the public atrium at 60 Wall Street. The building is the national headquarters of Deutsche Bank. But its public atrium is a privately-owned public space that has become a de facto conference space for OWS groups. Baric heads towards the street, swinging his shoulders noticeably when he walks. He chews on his cigarette. “Hey sweetie, have you got a light?” he says to a woman walking by. Baric is bullish about the archives project. “It can serve as a function in transparency, democracy, humanism,” he says while tugging his scruffy beard. He had been staying at Zuccotti Park until the eviction. He first came in to New York from California on November 1 to pitch his book on radical politics, “The Complete American’s Guide to REVOLUTION.” He talks rapidly about the archive’s scope: tweets, Facebook feeds, oral histories, physical and digital ephemera: “It’s going to be one of the most ambitious and complex digital initiatives ever undertaken.”

He enters an office at 50 Broadway, a few blocks from 60 Wall Street. The office is home to several of the movement’s groups. Past the green and black Nirvana poster on the far wall is a space for cubicles. Here, Baric pulls out an oversized garbage bag and retrieves a fist-sized piece of an electric blue banjo. He says it was retrieved from the Department of Sanitation after the police’s overnight raid. “We also retrieved the bodies of puppies that were crushed during the eviction,” he says, “but we couldn’t keep those.” (Note: There are various posts on social networks such as Facebook and reddit about the puppies, but no confirmed reports.)

The garbage bag also contains a poster of a young girl mouthing the words “We are the 99%,” a rolled-up infographic showing the disproportionate wealth of “the 1 percent”, and a Spy vs. Spy adaptation of Shepard Fairey’s iconic “Hope” poster. The current storage arrangement is hazardous to long-term preservation; the environment is not controlled for light and temperature, and lumping together artifacts in a garbage bag could lead to mold.

But the immediacy of this problem doesn’t resonate with some members of the archives group. “Maybe at some point, but we don’t have to worry about it now,” says James Molenda, 32. He wears a bright blue sweater and a furry dog-eared hat, balanced against a perpetual frown and a slow, monotone voice. He is the managing editor of FOUND Magazine, a sporadically published collection of crowdsourced notes, letters and photographs. He is focused on cataloging artifacts as they come in and tagging them according to theme and medium. “For example,” he says, “a cardboard sign protesting police brutality would be dated, tagged with “police” and “cardboard” and entered into the catalogue with a low-resolution photograph.” The next stage involves, he says, “those who are trained for this stuff,” referring to the library science students such as Bold, who can organize the catalogue in a meaningful structure that would allow a narrative to form.