A call for volunteers: The COVID-19 Pandemic has affected all of us in many different ways and we are all eyewitnesses to the events that have been unfolding the last few weeks. This is a time for us to record our daily experiences, thoughts, and feelings in diary form, either in writing or video. We envision collecting and preserving the stories of the Wright State University community (students, faculty, and staff) and Miami Valley residents. The goal is to preserve the stories of our daily lives during the crisis and to provide future historians, researchers, and students with information and data on life in the Miami Valley during the Pandemic.
For questions about the project or to submit a diary, please email the SC&A staff at library-archives@wright.edu.
The Sonoma County Library is seeking public help in documenting what they are calling "history in the making". Here's their message:
Sonoma Responds!
Contribute to a primary source collection about Sonoma County’s experience with COVID-19.
The Sonoma County Library invites community members to document history through writing, art, and other creative expression during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to donate these items to the library. The materials, representing firsthand experiences by local residents, will become part of a special library collection of primary sources.
Once the crisis is resolved and it is safe to bring items to the library, residents will be invited to bring in journals, photos, drawings, letters, scrapbooks and other two-dimensional physical documents that tell the story of life in Sonoma County during this time.
Library staff will catalog a selection of the items into a special collection that can be accessible to future generations of Sonoma County Library visitors.
“Researchers and students will be able to use your work to understand what it was like living in Sonoma County during this challenging time,” said Connie Williams, History Room Librarian at the Petaluma Regional Library. “Your story can be a part of our community’s story.”
An archive depends on all of us, and this page is a sampling of some efforts by citizen archivists, people from all walks of life, who take note of what is going on in their community and gather original materials that help build a community-based archive. It's very likely that the COVID-19 pandemic will soon be added to this list of Community Archiving opportunities!
Ready to start tagging and transcribing? The National Archives has curated these topical missions to help you jump in and contribute! Click on a topic that interests you, and it will bring you right to those historical records in our Catalog. Tagging and transcribing makes these records more accessible to everyone. New missions are added and updated regularly, so check back often to see what’s new.
Imagine that 100 years from now you are researching the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic in Northeastern Minnesota. It’s easy to find dry statistics and numbers, but you want more. What were people thinking and feeling during this time? What informational materials and public art did they create? How were they helping each other? What did the day-to-day experience of this time look like in Duluth?
What if there were an archive of those experiences for you to explore?
Welcome to the Northeastern Minnesota COVID-19 Community Archives Project, organized by the University of Minnesota Duluth Archives & Special Collections. The goal of this project is to create a community archive that will preserve the story of this unprecedented time in our community. To do this, we need your help. We would like to collect the materials you are creating right now that document this time.