Category Archives: Colleges and Universities

Carleton Covid-19 Archive

The Carleton Covid-19 Archive focuses on the pandemic’s impact on Carleton College and its communities, and the responses and experiences of those communities. All submissions are welcome, but it especially encourages the participation of Carleton students, faculty, staff, alumni, neighbors, and community partners. Submissions can include materials of institutional and organizational responses, community responses, and personal responses and experiences in the formats of  photographs, announcements, posters, emails, journals, artwork, social media content, and more. Carleton students will curate submissions while also gathering materials for the archive themselves. A course blog provides additional insight into the course and the work students are doing on the project.

Once the urgency of the pandemic has passed, the project will work with the Carleton College Archives to determine the best permanent home for the items gathered by the project.

UMaine COVID-19 Community Archive

The University of Maine COVID-19 Community Archive is a collection of items compiled as part of Raymond H. Fogler Library’s Special Collections’ project to create an archive that preserves the story of the experiences of the University of Maine community during the pandemic. Material was submitted to Special Collections by members of the University community and web content harvested directly by the University Archivist, starting in February 2020.

As well as collecting and preserving the University’s administration’s response the COVID-19 Community Archive documents the responses of individual University of Maine departments to the pandemic, particularly the transition to online teaching and learning. The Archive also contains items that illustrate the personal experiences of individual students, faculty, researchers, staff, and alumni, whether currently in Maine or not.

College of Staten Island Public History Coronavirus Chronicle

Organized by the History Department at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), this project seeks Staten Islanders from all walks of life to send in anything that will help tell the story of the health emergency in order to archive the what life has been like during the crisis. The project operates through the group’s Facebook page. Those who wish to submit pictures, videos, stories or documents can do so through the Facebook page or via email to: susan.smithpeter@csi.cuny.edu

An Oral History of Iowa’s Chinese Americans and Nationals Experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This project, based at the University of Iowa, will conduct oral history research in three major towns in Iowa, including Ames, Iowa City, and Des Moines to collect the stories and testimony of Chinese nationals and immigrants and exhibit them to the general public.

Project members have already conducted interviews with several Chinese students on the campus and collected their stories fraught with frustrations and sadness. Integrated to the institutional oral history project operated by the University of Iowa Libraries, the team members of this research have collected oral history materials on the campus under the University Archivist of the University of Iowa (UI) David McCartney’s supervision. 

Chippewa Valley Covid-19 Archive

In response to the pandemic, in spring 2020 the Public History Program and the McIntyre Library at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire joined with the Chippewa Valley Museum to launch the Chippewa Valley Covid-19 Archive, a rapid-response collection project to document the effects of the Coronavirus in rural Western Wisconsin. The archive is dedicated to preserving oral histories and materials related to Covid-19 and its impacts on the region, with the imperative to compile a diverse picture of its effects across our communities.

Documenting the Undocumented: Covid-19 Oral Histories & Immigrant Workers in Rural Wisconsin

“Documenting the Undocumented“ is a project at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire that seeks to collect and archive and make publicly available oral history interviews with Spanish-speaking populations in Western Wisconsin, particularly migrant and undocumented workers, many of whom work on dairy farms in the region. Documenting the experiences of Spanish-speaking, immigrant, and undocumented populations is an essential part of understanding the pandemic’s impacts in Wisconsin and the rural Midwest, as well as the intersections of race, power, and structural inequality that the crisis has highlighted.

This oral history project seeks to fill archival silences by preserving marginalized voices that have often been absent in historical sources and create a repository preserving a diverse cross section of experiences to help future scholars, students, and policymakers better understand the impact of Covid-19 on Wisconsin and the rural Midwest. 

Locked Down: An Oral History of the Covid-19 Virus in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle

“Locked Down: An Oral History of the Covid-19 Virus in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle” collects stories about how the global pandemic shapes the lives of people in vulnerable Appalachian communities. During the summer of 2020 Shepherd University students conducted and transcribed 27 interviews. Interviewees included students, faculty, and administrators, local teachers and students from grades K-12, community members and business owners, and local government officials. Audio and video from the interviews will be housed in the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education and the Historic Shepherdstown Commission and will be available to the public online.

MISSING THEM: Remembering the New Yorkers Lost to COVID-19

MISSING THEM is a joint project of The City (a nonprofit, nonpartisan, digital news platform reporting on New York City), Columbia Journalism School, and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York that is building a searchable memorial to remember and honor all New Yorkers who have died of coronavirus. Obituary pages are missing names and stories, especially among members of the city’s black and Latino communities, which have been impacted at disproportionately high rates. To include a New Yorker lost due to the coronavirus:

Barnard Zine Library

Barnard Zine Library staff are collecting COVID-19 themed zines made by womxn, nonbinary people, and all members of the Barnard community. They can provide a postal address (the zine librarian’s home) or can print black and white pdfs on 8.5×11 paper. Email zines@barnard.edu to connect with them. As of June 13, there are 80 COVID-19 related zines in the collection, some of them with download links. The collection contains zines from at least nine countries, in four languages.

The Pandemic Journaling Project

The Pandemic Journaling Project from the University of Connecticut combines survey questions with open-ended journal entries to make sure that ordinary people struggling through this pandemic have their voices heard, and their experiences remembered. Participants will receive weekly prompts via email or text message with a link to a few questions and the option to create (via writing, audio, or uploading and describing a photo) brief description of how the pandemic is affecting them. Answers to the survey questions, together with the journal entries, will be preserved as a digital archive, and users can control the privacy and access settings for each entry. They will help researchers learn how different people are experiencing the pandemic, identify challenges in our country’s pandemic response, and work toward solutions.