The COVID-19 pandemic is history happening now and your experiences are important to telling this story. The Texas State University Libraries and University Archives are collecting stories that show how our students, faculty, staff and community neighbors have experienced and documented the events as they unfold. We want to hear from you! Please consider uploading your personal experiences to our project: guides.library.txstate.edu/covid-19. How you record and document your thoughts and experiences is up to you. You could write in a journal, record voice memos, save social media posts, or take photos and/or videos of life as you see it. All types of files are welcome and if you have a physical item or file we cannot accept through our online form, please contact the University Archives: UnivArchives@txstate.edu.
Your voice will ensure that these experiences are not lost to history. You may feel like your voice is not important enough to be captured for future historians, but examples from our collections on the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 demonstrate how perspectives were documented and that every voice is essential to telling a story. Our goal is to marry the voices of the past with the voices of today in an exploration of the human experience. Whether you are keeping a journal, taking photographs of empty streets or business signage, or creating paintings, poetry or songs, we want to hear about it and preserve it for future generations. We are experiencing history in the making and want to hear from you.
This article was contributed by Laura Waugh, University Libraries Digital Collections Librarian.