Documenting COVID-19 Experiences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
The Special Collections department of the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery is documenting the experiences of UMBC students, staff, faculty, and other members of the campus community during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and contributing them to the UMBC University Archives. We invite you to share your stories, photographs, videos, and other documentation about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
How to participate
We are interested in your stories about the shift to remote instruction and learning, studying and working from home, working at on-campus and off-campus jobs, the impact of closing residence halls and other campus services, the ways you and your friends and family are staying in touch during this period of social distancing and self-quarantine, the emotional impact of the pandemic, and so on.
How you record your thoughts and experiences is up to you. For instance, you can write in a journal, record voice memos, save your social media posts, take photographs and/or videos of life as you see it, or create multimedia works of digital storytelling.
Donation process
Please use this Google Form to submit your items. A Google login is required (either Gmail or UMBC email). Please email us for alternative transfer methods, if necessary. Your email address will not be shared or sold. You will be able to sign an agreement allowing UMBC to preserve your submission, and you will receive important information about the copyright and use of your content.
We can accept a wide variety of formats, including photographs, videos, audio, and text. A wide variety of file formats are accepted.
This form is for donations by individuals only; UMBC staff or faculty hoping to make a donation on behalf of their department should follow standard University Archives records transfer procedures (https://library.umbc.edu/speccoll/recordsmanagement.php).
All donors will be contacted once their items have been reviewed and added to the collection; we do not have a schedule for this review in place at this time. Submissions will not be available to the public immediately. Thank you for your patience!
Please reach out directly to Lindsey Loeper, Reference and Instruction Archivist in the UMBC Special Collections department, with any questions, comments, or other concerns (lindseyloeper@umbc.edu or 410-455-2353 for voicemail).
Access to the collection
Once items have been reviewed and accepted into the University Archives, they will form Collection 306, the UMBC COVID-19 collection. Researchers will be able to view the items online through UMBC’s Digital Collections and on-site in the Special Collections Reading Room.
Campus resources
For UMBC’s updates on the pandemic and available resources, visit https://covid19.umbc.edu/.
Faculty and staff that would like to preserve and provide access to scholarly and creative works should use ScholarWorks@UMBC.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Katie Howell of J. Murrey Atkins Library, University of North Carolina Charlotte and Megan Badgely-Malone, Michigan State University Archives & Historical Collections of Michigan State University Libraries for allowing us to use text and ideas from their COVID-19 collecting websites.
Community members may also be interested in the Pandemic Archive: Lost & Found, coordinated by Dr. Rebecca Adelman (MCS), the Maryland Historical Society’s Collecting in Quarantine initiative, or A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID19 from the University of Arizona.
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