Documenting COVID-19 at UAB

A Library’s Role in Preserving Accounts of the Coronavirus Pandemic

Authors

  • Margaret W. Balch Reynolds-Finley Historical Library, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  • Anna L. Kaetz Reynolds-Finley Historical Library, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Keywords:

pandemic, collections

Abstract

In August of 2020, UAB Libraries of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) launched the Documenting COVID-19 at UAB project, seeking the stories of UAB students, faculty, staff, and health care workers navigating life during COVID-19 to preserve them in a born-digital collection. Since then, ninety-five items have been added to the collection, including photographs, video/audio productions, news items, and personal written accounts. This article discusses the planning and creation of the Documenting COVID-19 at UAB collection and highlights several submissions that provided uniquely insightful information about the pandemic. It also addresses how libraries play a key role in preserving history. 

JSAHMS Cover Vol. 4 No. 1 2022 The Investigator

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Published

2022-03-10

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2022): Journal for the Southern Association of the History of Medicine and Science

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Margaret W. Balch, Anna L. Kaetz

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The author(s) retains all rights to this work, including future publications, provided that the author(s) includes a full reference or link to the original as it appears in The Journal of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science. This agreement incorporates the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/).