On January 22, the Library of Congress (LOC) announced the launch of the COVID-19 Archive Activation website, an online tool created in collaboration with national oral history nonprofit StoryCorps, which will allow members of the public to submit audio accounts of their pandemic experience. Anyone wishing to share their story or interview others can take part. These oral histories will become part of LOC’s American Folklife Center (AFC) collections and be made accessible at archive.StoryCorps.org.

The initiative is part of the COVID-19 American History Project, a congressionally funded program (championed by Rep. Julia Letlow, who was elected after her husband, Luke, died from COVID before taking office) to collect, preserve, and make available an archive of pandemic stories from United States residents—with the goal of helping future generations understand the nation’s collective experience with COVID, and to honor those whose lives were changed or lost.

“Our colleagues at StoryCorps have such capacity to collect the stories on a big national scale,” said Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden. “When you think about the significance of this pandemic, there are going to be lessons learned from this.”

Participants are encouraged to speak to someone they care about, or to talk solo, and record their accounts on the free StoryCorps Connect online platform. Detailed instructions and prompts are provided; the only requirements are a strong internet connection, access to a laptop or desktop computer with a microphone, “and an open heart.” Suggested questions to ask and answer include:

• When did you first realize the pandemic would radically change the world and/your way of life?
• Describe the ways in which your life now is different than before the pandemic.
• What do you wish more people knew about your experience during Covid?

The stories will then be submitted through the Archive Activation website and deposited into the AFC collections.

Both partners will be reaching out to a range of populations across the country, looking to hear from frontline workers, medical professionals, emergency service workers, and anyone with a story to tell—and of course librarians, who were providing critical information, Wi-Fi access, virtual learning, testing, and more, Hayden told LJ.

“We’re working with the national media, trade groups, and associations to spread the word, because we want to have more people involved,” she added.

“I can’t emphasize enough how everyone's COVID-19 experience is valuable,” AFC Director Nicole Saylor said. “It’s worth preserving. It doesn’t matter your zip code, your community, whether you contracted it. Everyone has a story.”

As part of the project, AFC has also contracted a cohort of professional oral historians to document the stories of frontline workers during the pandemic. Their goal is to conduct approximately 90 new interviews that will become part of the collection, including conversations with professional childcare workers in rural Appalachian areas of Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia; funeral professionals, such as embalmers and cremationists, across the country; and hospitality workers in New Orleans. Those interviews will roll in this spring and summer, said Saylor, and will eventually be posted on LOC’s site.

The project’s third component, an online research guide, links to online COVID-19 collections both within and outside of LOC. The site’s introduction reads, “This guide provides historical perspectives on American life, and an opportunity to document contemporary experiences, as COVID-19 transitions from a pandemic to an endemic in the United States.”

NO SHORTAGE OF MATERIAL

Both collaborators are well poised to take on this project. LOC and StoryCorps are longtime partners; since StoryCorps’s launch in 2003, its archives have been housed at AFC. StoryCorps has built archives activation pages for other projects, and offered a tool for capturing pandemic accounts prior to this project.

While turning publicly sourced stories into searchable, discoverable content involves a fair amount of backend work, noted Saylor, AFC has experience with similar community collection initiatives that have helped inform the process. She pointed to the Occupational Folklife Project, launched in 2010 and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has helped AFC “streamline what happens in the field and then what happens in the archives,” she said. AFC provides metadata training and templates to field interviewers so that information arrives in a structured format, and “with StoryCorps, we already have a pretty smooth workflow for getting standard metadata from them.”

Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of material for AFC to work with, noted Saylor—including StoryCorps’s existing pandemic stories, some of which will be incorporated into the LOC collection. LOC’s Prints and Photographs Division put out a public call on Flickr for pandemic-related images, and have put together a sizeable archive. Hayden hopes that library staff will set up recording areas for patrons to contribute. “We’re finding things all the time that speak to this story, and we’re pulling them into the project,” Saylor said.

Going forward, LOC will make use the COVID-19 collection as part of its Teaching with Primary Sources program, and Saylor envisions it as a boon resource for K–12 teachers and scholars, as well as curious members of the public. While the initial active push for stories may wind down in a few years, as long as LOC and StoryCorps maintain an active collaboration, Saylor sees the two organizations continuing to share these histories.

Other partnerships may come into play as well. “We’re hearing from all kinds of people as we publicize this work,” she said. “That will be a next step, once we have a certain amount of these collections in hand—what is the most responsible and impactful way to encourage people to use them?”