C&RL News June 2020 280 In February 2020, the Seton Hall University Archives and Special Collections Center began the largely uncharted process of col- lecting and archiving the experiences of the university’s staff, students, and faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article describes the procedures put in place to crowdsource personal narratives and the decisions made to leverage the use of cell phones and social media—the new tools of oral history—to encourage participation by the community. Background Seton Hall, an R2, private, Catholic universi- ty, is located in South Orange, a town of just under 17,000 people in Essex County, New Jersey. As of April 22, 2020, 92,000 people in the state have been diagnosed with coro- navirus, and New Jersey is currently under lockdown. The campus is now closed, and the students have returned home. In February, as university life moved off- site, Karen Boroff, interim provost, proposed the idea of documenting the community’s experience during this time. John Buschman, dean of Seton Hall University Libraries, asked his team to explore the project, and library faculty and administrators organized a small group to put the project together. The design and implementation team consisted of Sarah Ponichtera, assistant dean for special collections and the gallery; Eliza- beth Leonard, assistant dean for information technologies and collection services; Sharon Ince, digital services librarian; Sheridan Sayles, technical services archivist; and Angela Kot- sonis, faculty member from the Department of Communication served as an advisor to the project. At the time of this writing, 2.5 million people have contracted coronavirus, and, as of April 21, 2020, there were more than 776,000 reported cases and more than 41,000 fatalities in the United States. Documenting the effects of the pandemic on our society has taken center stage for many archives and historical societies around the United States. Without ac- cess to the historic materials that usually center archivists’ work, they have turned outward to document the historic moment we are all living through. Efforts include web archiving to document the shift of many activities to an online format, such as the Coronavirus Collec- tion, a “collaboration between Archive-It and the International Internet Preservation Consor- tium’s (IIPC) Content Development Group”1 and the National Library of Medicine’s Global Health Events Web Archive, “a selective collec- tion of websites on global health events [that places] Coronavirus alongside its resources on the Ebola and Zika virus outbreaks.”2 Marta Mestrovic Deyrup and Sarah Ponichtera Community sourcing a response to COVID-19 A campus oral history project records the experiences of Seton Hall University’s students, staff, and faculty during the pandemic Marta Mestrovic Deyrup is humanities and outreach librarian, email: marta.deyrup@shu.edu, and Sarah Ponichtera is assistant dean for special collections and the gallery, email: sarah.ponichtera@shu.edu, at Seton Hall University © 2020 Marta Mestrovic Deyrup and Sarah Ponichtera mailto:marta.deyrup%40shu.edu?subject= mailto:sarah.ponichtera@shu.edu June 2020 281 C&RL News There has also been a shift to crowdsourc- ing, asking volunteers to contribute to archival work, such as transcription and description. This is the case with the Library of Congress’s By the People Project,3 which involves tran- scribing, tagging, and placing online historical documents from the Library’s collections, and the University of Iowa Libraries DiY History Project,4 which began in 2011 as a project to transcribe its Civil War diaries and letters. There are also many projects that attempt to capture people’s stories of the experiences they are living through at this moment in time. Building on p e o p l e ’ s capacity to record their own voices and tell their own stories u s i n g t h e powerful re- cording de- vices many of us carry daily in the form of our cell phones, these proj- ects ask their constituen- cies, whether geographic or community- based, to narrate some aspect of their experi- ence for future generations. One iconic example is StoryCorps Con- nect, which was “developed in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic” and is a “first of its kind platform that enables [the user] to record an interview . . . remotely using video conference technology.”5 Along similar lines, Seton Hall’s project sought to capture the multi-layered experi- ences of its university community, broadly conceived, centering on the students who are at the heart of this enterprise, but also includ- ing the experiences of faculty and staff, as their lives changed as well. Kotsonis developed questions that asked respondents to reflect on their experiences, to analyze what they were living through, and to examine their beliefs and hopes for the future. The immediate goal was to bring people back together in conver- sation in ways that had been taken from them due to the need to isolate the community from the virus. When they are able to return, they plan to use these stories as a touchstone and a guide, reflecting on them as they decide what they can take from these moments into the future. In the long term, projects such as Seton Hall’s will someday allow future historians to build digital humanities projects contextualiz- ing and ana- lyzing the h i s t o r y o f t h i s m o - m e n t . We h a v e i n mind proj- ects such as the National A r c h i v e s C a t a l o g ’ s coverage of Spanish In- fluenza6 and the Univer- sity of Michi- gan’s Center for the His- tory of Medicine’s massive database, the American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: a Digital Encyclopedia.7 The implementation team also looked at the website, Archiving Oral History: Manual of Best Practices,8 which focuses on accessibility and discoverability, as well as the guidelines for creating oral history projects posted on the website of the Society of American Archi- vists. Ultimately, however, they were guided by the needs of the community. The mis- sion statement of Seton Hall’s Archives and Special Collections is to serve as the “official repository for materials of enduring historical value documenting Seton Hall University.” As Ponichtera commented, “Sometimes [collect- ing historical materials] looks like collecting the letters or photographs of someone at the C&RL News June 2020 282 center of historic events. Other times—as with this project—it may be records that document the experiences of average people, which will show how people like ourselves navigated extreme circumstances in the past.” Oral history projects generally consist of structured interviews overseen or conducted by a scholar using a traditional, history-centric methodology. Instead, Ponichtera proposed using crowdsourcing as the project’s principal means for collecting data. She also advocated making the layout of the future website as open and accessible as possible to encourage the community to upload and share its stories. As Kotsonis, one of the advisors to the project noted, “Framing this as a space to negotiate the moment and to connect was crucial. People had to want to participate. They [need] it.” To acknowledge the importance of community, the Seton Hall project was named “Together Again: Personal Narratives of COVID-19.”9 The repository Once the parameters of the project were clearly established, the implementation team looked at commercial and open- source platforms to determine whether they had the functionality to adequately sup- port these community narratives. Ultimate- ly, the team selected Digital Commons.10 There were several immediate advantages to this choice, the most important being that library staff was already familiar with the product, which had been used as Se- ton Hall’s institutional repository for many years. Customizations to the database, such as disabling downloads and creating an enhanced submission button, were under- taken by bepress, the parent company. For those who do not have Digital Commons or another repository platform, Kotsonis suggests SoundCloud11 as a good place to house materials intended for community- based projects with a public listening goal. It is easy to access, manage, and has an ex- cellent embed feature. Sharon Ince and Elizabeth Leonard de- cided to keep the submission form brief to encourage participation. Both the instruc- tions12 and submission form are accessible from the library homepage. The form asked for minimum information: title of the sub- mission, name of the author, date recorded, date submitted, location of the story, and keywords. Instead of a textual narrative, the form required that an audio or video file of one-to-three minutes be uploaded. The re- cording length was suggested by Kostonis, who requires similar recordings for short stu- dent projects in her oral history class. Lastly, in the long term, the team decided to store the files in Preservica, the library’s digital preservation system. The program would check the files for integrity on an automated basis, ensure that they were protected from accidental deletion or server failure, and au- tomatically update the formats of the files, so that if, for example, mp3s are replaced with a new format, the files will still be readable and publicly accessible. The introductory text was deliberately kept simple, emphasizing the bonds of com- munity (see sidebar on page 283). Marketing plan Since the university’s physical campus was inaccessible for an indeterminate length of time, the implementation team needed June 2020 283 C&RL News Introductory text from the repository The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life at Seton Hall as it has for millions of others around the country and the world. In the name of saving lives, the social distancing needed to slow the spread of the virus has scattered us into our homes around the region and the country. Although we are now physically distant from one another, we remain united as Pirates through our connec- tion to Seton Hall. To reconnect as a community, we seek your stories of what this time has been like for you. How has it changed your experi- ence at Seton Hall, as a student, faculty, staff member, or alum? We hope that sharing these stories with one another will bring us back together in a new way, through sharing our personal experiences of this moment. When we move forward, because there will be a time when we move forward, we plan to lis- ten to these stories together as a community, reflect on what we have learned, and let them guide us into the future. Questions to guide your response: • What is your day-to-day life like? What would you want people in the future to know about what life is like for us now? • What has been most challenging about this time? What do you miss about your life before COVID-19? Are there specific places or things on campus that you miss? • Essential is a word we are hearing a lot right now. What does essential mean to you? Who is essential? What are we learning about what is essential? • What is COVID-19 making possible that never existed before? What good do you see coming out of this moment? How can we reframe this moment as an opportunity? • What is it you want to remember about this time? What have you learned? • After this pandemic ends, will things go back to the way they were? What kinds of changes would you like to see? How will you contribute to rebuilding the world? What will you do differently? to come up with a mar- keting plan that could reach the c o m m u n i t y in virtual space. The m a r k e t i n g plan in- volved both the staff of the Univer- sity Libraries and the Archives and Special Collections Center. Librarians contacted the community using email blasts and so- cial media and sent email notices to their liaison departments. Librarians at the Inter- professional Health Science Library, which serves Seton Hall’s medical and health pro- fessionals, approached students who were involved with C O V I D - 1 9 r e s e a r c h . A market- ing icon was placed prominently on the library h o m e p a g e r e q u e s t i n g personal nar- ratives. Conclusion The “Together Again” project was conceived as community-driven archival repository in late winter 2020. It is showing great promise both as a platform for recording the experi- ence of our community during the COVID-19 pandemic and as a means of bringing the community closer together through a shared C&RL News June 2020 284 common experience. Seton Hall’s selection of video and audio files to record anecdotal events instead of textual narrative and the use of cellphones as personal assistant devices are part of a larger movement that has been accelerated by recent events to change the way history is re- corded, particularly at educational institutions.13 Acknowledgement The authors wish to thank Elizabeth Leonard, assistant dean for information technologies and collection services; Sharon Ince, digital services librarian; Sheridan Sayles, technical services archivist; and Angela Kotsonis, in- structor, School of Communication and the Arts, for their contributions to this article. Graphic design of images and the project logo was done by Allison Piazza, health sciences librarian, Seton Hall University. Notes 1. S e e h t t p s : / / a r c h i v e - i t . o r g /collections/13529. 2. S e e h t t p s : / / a r c h i v e - i t . o r g /collections/4887. 3. See https://crowd.loc.gov/. 4. See http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/. 5. See https://storycorps.org/participate /storycorps-connect. 6. See https://www.archives.gov/exhibits /influenza-epidemic/index.html. 7. See https://www.influenzaarchive.org. 8. See https://www.oralhistory.org/archives -principles-and-best-practices-complete-manual. 9. See https://scholarship.shu.edu /covid-19/. 10. See http://www.bepress.com /products/digital-commons/. 11. See https://creators.soundcloud.com /guide/videos/sharing-your-work. 12. S e e h t t p s : / / l i b r a r y . s h u . e d u /remotelibrary/narrativeinstructions. 13. For more information on COVID-19 projects, see the New York Times article “What Historians Will See When They Look Back on the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/us /coronavirus-pandemic-historians-archive. html; A Journal of the Plague Year, https:// covid19.omeka.net/, run by historians and archivists from Arizona State, Fordham, Brown, Northeastern, and more; and Nicole Greenhouse’s comprehensive list of archi- vists’ efforts to capture and preserve websites documenting the history of this moment, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12 2oyYEfrfhMxX7XgQJ14weTU0tTDIQlk38Uq J09qxSU/edit#g. New from ACRL The Engaged Library: High-Impact Educational Practices in Academic Libraries edited by Joan D. Ruelle Available at www.alastore.ala.org Julynewsad.indd 1Julynewsad.indd 1 5/13/2020 9:25:58 AM5/13/2020 9:25:58 AM https://archive-it.org/collections/13529 https://archive-it.org/collections/13529 https://archive-it.org/collections/4887 https://archive-it.org/collections/4887 https://crowd.loc.gov/ http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/ https://storycorps.org/participate /storycorps-connect https://storycorps.org/participate /storycorps-connect https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/influenza-epidemic/index.html https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/influenza-epidemic/index.html https://www.influenzaarchive.org https://www.oralhistory.org/archives-principles-and-best-practices-complete-manua https://www.oralhistory.org/archives-principles-and-best-practices-complete-manua https://scholarship.shu.edu/covid-19/ https://scholarship.shu.edu/covid-19/ http://www.bepress.com/products/digital-commons/ http://www.bepress.com/products/digital-commons/ https://creators.soundcloud.com/guide/videos/sharing-your-work https://creators.soundcloud.com/guide/videos/sharing-your-work https://library.shu.edu/remotelibrary/narrativeinstructions https://library.shu.edu/remotelibrary/narrativeinstructions https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/us/coronavirus-pandemic-historians-archive.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/us/coronavirus-pandemic-historians-archive.html https://covid19.omeka.net/ https://covid19.omeka.net/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/122oyYEfrfhMxX7XgQJ14weTU0tTDIQlk38UqJ09qxSU/edit#g https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/122oyYEfrfhMxX7XgQJ14weTU0tTDIQlk38UqJ09qxSU/edit#g https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/122oyYEfrfhMxX7XgQJ14weTU0tTDIQlk38UqJ09qxSU/edit#g