Archiving the Pandemic: UTA's COVID-19 documentation project

The purpose of The Compass Rose is to raise awareness of Special Collections' resources and to foster the use of these resources. The blog series also reports significant new programs, initiatives, and acquisitions of Special Collections.

The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries' Archiving the Pandemic: COVID-19 Documentation Project is a multi-faceted initiative of the UTA Libraries Special Collections that is preserving the history of the pandemic and its impact on the UTA community in real time. Work on the project began in late March after the shelter-in-place orders were issued in both Tarrant County and Dallas County, causing most Special Collections staff to work from home. The project was inspired by other similar efforts to document the pandemic at different universities, most notably the University of North Texas's Archiving the Pandemic project.

UTA's Archiving the Pandemic project has four major components, two that preserve the community's experience of the pandemic and two that maintain the official university record relating to COVID-19. This blog post details all four parts of the project, beginning with the community-facing ones.

Inspired by UNT's use of their Keeper web application to accept digital materials created by the community, Special Collections Archivist Priscilla Escobedo and I (University and Labor Archivist Michael Barera) created a Qualtrics form that similarly accepted uploaded digital files to mimic this functionality. While Qualtrics is primarily used for conducting online surveys, its advanced functions allowed us to create an effective submission form without having to build our own web application. Since it was launched in early May, this form was updated a few times and then completely transferred to a different platform, QuestionPro, following a university-wide migration from Qualtrics to QuestionPro this summer. The current version of the form allows community members to submit up to five different digital files along with metadata about those files, information about themselves as creators and contributors, and various legal and privacy-related permissions that give the Libraries the rights to preserve and provide access to these materials.

Since digital submissions began being accepted in early May, a total of 68 digital files have been submitted to the Libraries by 39 individual donors. The form also allows for submitting metadata for physical items to be delivered later to Special Collections; a total of three physical items have been "promised" through the form, two of which have already been delivered physically. The form also allows members of the community to volunteer to participate in the Archiving the Pandemic oral history project (see below), either separately from or in addition to the donation of a digital or physical item, and a total of 13 people have already volunteered to participate in an oral history.

The submission form was intentionally designed to be open-ended and allow for the submission of many types of files documenting individual experiences during the pandemic. Among the submissions are many photographs, videos, blog posts, digital journals, and social media posts. Many less expected contributions were made as well, including a story on COVID-19 from a UTA Radio broadcast, original works from 14 UTA Theatre Arts majors on the themes "A Day in the Life of Quarantine" and "COVID-19: The Transition," and a socially distanced video recording of a "Playing for Change"-style collaborative cover of the Beatles' song "All Together Now." At times serious and at time lighthearted, at times candid and at times very professionally polished, the submissions to this form offer a remarkable cross section of how COVID-19 has impacted the UTA community.

Alongside the community submission form, the oral history project is the other major Archiving the Pandemic component that documents how COVID-19 has impacted the UTA community. This project is managed by Digital Publishing and Repository Librarian Yumi Ohira. Participants in the oral history project sign up by noting their willingness to participate in the QuestionPro form (see above). Once the participant submits the form, Ohira contacts them and asks if they would like to participate as an interviewee or an interviewer in an oral history interview. Once Ohira is able to match an interviewee and an interviewer as a pair, she e-mails both of them, asking them to introduce themselves to each other and call each other once before the actual interview in order to better get to know each other.

To prepare for the oral history interview, Ohira provides the interviewer with a basic list of suggested questions as well as steps for conducting a successful oral history interview. The interviewer may add or modify questions at their discretion, often based on what they learn about the interviewee during their initial conversation. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the interviews are conducted remotely through Microsoft Teams, either as video or audio-only interviews. The interviewer is responsible for recording these interviews in Teams, which they then share with Ohira after the interview is completed. The finalized oral history files are then shared with the public via the UTA Libraries Avalon Media System collection "Archiving the COVID-19 Pandemic." At the moment, a total of four oral histories have been published on this site.

In addition to capturing the community response to COVID-19, the Archiving the Pandemic project is also capturing the official university response. The primary way this is accomplished is by web archiving UTA's COVID-19 web pages as they are updated. I have been using the university's subscription to the web archiving tool Archive-It to manually capture all university pages related to COVID-19 as they are updated. This effort began with a single webpage during the early days of the pandemic in March, which is still the access point for researchers and the public who are looking to find these archived web pages. This page in Archive-It shows all the captures made on that single webpage as it is archived, over 50 since it first appeared in March. Each capture represents a different appearance of this critical-information page, each of which (aside from the current version) is no longer available live on the Internet. In theory at least, this web archiving initiative is capturing each version of every UTA webpage related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beyond the aforementioned main information page, some of the other most critical and time-sensitive pages that are being both captured by this initiative and also preserved for future research are the pages on confirmed cases, testing, and travel restrictions. These multiple crawls will illuminate the progression of the pandemic on campus for future researchers. For instance, they show that the second case of COVID-19 on campus was not reported until mid-June and that by late July there were 13 reported cases. Similarly, this web archive reveals that in early May UTA community members had to quarantine if flying in from multiple states (including California, New York, and Washington), but that these requirements had been lifted by the end of the month.

Finally, we are also preserving official university communications about COVID-19. The most basic and mundane of the four parts of the Archiving the Pandemic project, this simply involves printing out all official university communications about COVID-19 (which are disseminated to employees by e-mail) and saving them in a vertical file called "COVID-19 at UTA." These e-mails are also being saved digitally in PDF format. Preserving these official communications about the pandemic and its impact on campus will provide a complete and unbroken record of official statements and messaging about the topic, all conveniently located in one vertical file, which will be available to future researchers who are interested in studying COVID-19 and its impact on UTA.