Creating an Archives of Our Time: Documenting the University of Maine During COVID-19

The COVID-19 global pandemic is “history in our time” and will clearly be an event researched for many years to come. As an archivist in the University of Maine Raymond H. Fogler Library’s Special Collections Department, I knew I wanted to collect and preserve primary sources from the university’s community that document this time. Using the University of Maine’s Institutional Repository Digital Commons, I’ve created an online archives of material documenting our community’s response to COVID-19.

My inspiration for creating a COVID-19 community archives came from the excellent work I’d seen at other institutions, particularly the University of Minnesota. I saw creating an archives as a great opportunity to be proactive in response to the pandemic and a positive indication that the library—and special collections in particular—was still open for business and relevant. From a personal perspective, capturing the material and building the online archives was work I could do from home, while still maintaining a connection with the UMaine community.

In addition to documenting the administration’s response to the pandemic, I also wanted to capture the responses of individual faculty, staff, researchers, students, and alumni—to include the voices of everyday people. My first decision was to limit the scope to content from the University of Maine community rather than a broader geographical area. I made this decision because of my responsibility specifically for UMaine records, but also because there are public libraries and historical societies with their own community projects, and I didn’t want to overlap. That said, the university holds a special place in the heart of many Mainers, so I’ve still accepted content from individuals without an obvious connection.

One of the challenges with any project of this kind is getting submissions. Without community involvement, there would be no archives, so I knew that I needed to promote the call for submissions heavily. I worked with the library’s marketing person on a press release, which the university published and local media picked up. This resulted in a few TV and newspaper interviews, which several donors have referred to when submitting content.

Joyce V. Rumery, dean of the university’s libraries, has been a great advocate of the archives, raising awareness among her fellow deans, who subsequently made their units aware. As a result, the university president even mentioned the archives in one of her town hall meetings. The departmental library liaisons have also promoted the archives to individual faculty members and faculty newsletters, and some faculty have encouraged students to submit content, particularly COVID-19-related projects that were added to many curriculums when the university shifted to remote learning.

Even with this widespread promotion, I’ve still had to do some digging, using messages to the university community from the offices of the president and provost to identify where there might be additional content. My biggest success was getting hold of curriculum material and student papers submitted to the provost office, which had put out a call for content to academic units.

Some material in the archives highlights individual department responses to the pandemic, such as the Athletics Department, which posted a series of images on social media of former student athletes who now work in healthcare. Research from other departments has shaped the broader response to the pandemic in Maine, such as the Cooperative Extension’s public guidance regarding safe handling of food. Other material illustrates ways that faculty and students have adapted to remote work, including a collaborative project that students worked on during a Zoom session and an image of a tripod a faculty member used to support teaching sculpture remotely. Although most content has been digital, I do have a few physical artifacts. For example, the university’s Advanced Manufacturing Center sent a donation of samples of face masks that they tested along with the test results.

One of the strongest supporters of the archives has been the University of Maine Alumni Association. More than twenty short, personal reflections came via the association, following a call they put out to members. Some of this content has been quite moving, as when one alum described the moment she found out that her youngest daughter had contracted the virus. These reflections are not the type of content I would generally add to an institutional repository, where scholarly communications reside, but they are appropriate for this time. Occasionally, I have had to act as a gatekeeper, such as in not posting content that referred to colleagues in a school district by name and only adding non-publically accessible content when I’ve received explicit permission from the author via our donation form.

The final category of material I’ve collected is UMaine’s administration content, taken mostly from the webpages of the university and emails sent to the community. This content reveals the timeline of the pandemic and the university’s response to it as well as how the response changed over time. As the university updated its guidance, I recaptured many pages.

Most content has been emailed to me directly. I did create a Google Form linked from a LibGuide for donors to submit content, but I haven’t received much material this way. About half of the content is material I harvested from webpages, social media, and informational emails. I don’t have the luxury of a web archiving tool like Archive-IT, so instead I’ve used a free Firefox browser plugin to take screenshots of webpages and save them as PDFs and another free tool to download YouTube videos. I’m saving emails as PDFs and considering using the free tool Conifer (formerly known as Webrecorder) for social media. Harvesting content manually is time consuming, especially considering the abundance of university web content, but I want to ensure we have a comprehensive collection of material from across campus.

As of September 2020, there are more than 770 items in the University of Maine COVID-19 Community Archive with more than 3,340 downloads. Still, there’s ongoing work to add content, especially as we return to campus and new guidance is released. The project has raised awareness for the university archives both on campus and beyond, and I hope to build upon this legacy with new programs in the future.

One of the most enjoyable things to come out of working on this project has been connecting with librarians, curators, and archivists across the state who have been working on their own community archives related to the pandemic. Many of these efforts are supported by a grant that the Maine State Library secured from IMLS for a group instance of an Omeka site.

Building the archives has also been a great opportunity to increase born-digital content in our collection, showing that we’re not only a custodian of physical content. Most important, I hope that the archives will accomplish what I set out to achieve, which is to serve as a collection of primary sources that can be used to study the University of Maine community’s positive response to this major historic event.