Archiving the Covid-19 pandemic

We have created this guidance to help a community archive decide why it might be important to collect material related to the pandemic, and what sort of things to collect. It offers some ideas about how an archive group might go about doing that, and the stages required to create an action plan for your organisation.

The guidance is structured around the headings 'Who, what, when, where, why, how?'

Who? Is this guidance suitable for your group?

This guidance is for community archive groups or heritage organisations. It is focused on voluntary groups who are responsible for a collection which is defined either by geography (eg a parish history group), or by a specific subject area (eg an industrial heritage museum). It may also be useful to smaller professional archives.

What? Records generated during the pandemic.

The pandemic has already produced all kinds of records, artifacts, ephemera and images. There are obvious things archives in general could collect from the pandemic. The most obvious visual images tend to reinforce certain well-worn themes. Examples of this include:

• Mask wearing
• Working from home
• Home schooling
• Rainbows for the NHS
• Quiet Streets and daily exercise
• Vaccination
• Clap for Carers

There are also widespread public records of some of the negative stories and impacts. Examples of those would be:

• Vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vax movement
• Covid scams
• Mental health impacts
• Impacts on other public services
• Racism, and other problems made worse by the pandemic and its environmental impacts

We are not suggesting that community archives need to collect these records as they are well understood and recorded on the national and international level. Instead, we suggest that smaller archives should focus on:

• The very local - what happened in your local area?
• The very short-lived - things no larger organisation would have access to
• The very personal - individual memories and recollections
• The themed - what did people do in your area of work?

These are things which are specific to your area or subject matter and might end up underrepresented in the future if only the mass media and incidental records of what has been happening are preserved.

Why? The potential aims and objectives of having a pandemic collection.

The International Council on Archives (ICA) have made a statement on the duty of archives to document the Covid-19 pandemic.

It can be summarised as saying that archives' duty to document doesn't stop in a crisis, it becomes more important. The statement has three main points:

• Decisions must be documented
• Records and data should be secured and preserved in all sectors
• The security, preservation and access to digital content should be facilitated during the lockdown

If your mission is to record a certain community or subject area, it's highly likely that there has been an impact on that area from the pandemic. This is where it helps if your organisation already has a clearly defined Mission Statement.

Community archives should also be guided by their communities. You should assess the level of interest and need from people around you for a new collection.

When? We are over two years into the pandemic as this guidance is written.

Although the pandemic is not over, it's clear that the nature of the situation will change repeatedly over time. Some things like national lockdowns may never happen again - and other things have become so normal now that they are no longer newsworthy. Don't wait until 'it's all over' to begin collecting.

How? Practical steps to collecting in these times.

Firstly, don't go outside of the existing limits of your collecting. That could water down your core mission, and lead to the material you collect not being very useful in future. You need to make sure that the material will be found by researchers, so there should be a match between their likely interests and the advertised mission of your archive.

You should also make sure that the material you collect is something you can look after long term It should fit with the logic of the rest of your collection.

To control these two factors, you need to have a clear statement of your plans. Hopefully, your community archive group already has a general collecting statement or policy on what it covers. If not, you can see our guidance on creating a collections management policy document.

Collecting statements usually cover:

• Scope - what types of record you collect, what themes, and from where you will collect
• Exclusions - what you don't or won't collect
• Methods of collection - physical, digital or both?
• Terms of acceptance - loan, gift or both? Will you take in records containing sensitive or personal data? What happens to your collections if your group ceases to exist?

Your Covid collecting statement should also contain these things but framed in terms of the specific situation. It needs to cover:

• What sort of material you want? For example, is it digital or physical? Photographs, documents, interviews? Are you collecting artifacts, or only paper material?
• Who do you want it from? Are you doing a specific project, for example 'children's memories of Covid' or are you collecting from a particular community, eg 'Market Langthwaite' residents' experiences?
• What essential characteristics must it have? Eg it should 'cover the response of local businesses' to the pandemic, or 'it should relate to your own families' experiences'. Or it should be 'no more than 20 minutes of audio recording, as an MP4 file'
• What don't you want? Are there things you are not able to look after, eg large objects? Or do you want to exclude very common items, eg 'no newspaper cuttings'?

One of the reasons it is so important to have a robust Covid collecting statement is the importance of the material, and the strength of the feelings it will bring out. The pandemic is one of the biggest things which has happened in most of our lifetimes, and it is still ongoing.

Collecting around current or very recent events isn't the same as looking back over several generations. You will be communicating with people with direct experience of the events you are referring to. Many of those experiences will have been negative, sad, or at least challenging.

The pandemic has included experiences of:

• Differing and strongly held views
• Political affiliation and campaigning
• Feelings of fear and insecurity; anger and resentment
• Sickness & bereavement
• Issues around financial pressure, loss of employment and even hunger
• Mental health impacts

You need to be prepared to handle quite strong reactions, and the clearer your initial plan is, the less likelihood there is of causing unintended offence or distress. Some ways you could avoid causing discomfort or distress are:

• Using sensitive language, and make sure your text has been read by several people before it is released
• Not overly focussing on the 'uplifting' stories - be aware that others may not have felt uplifted
• Emphasise that you're collecting data for the long term, not for idle interest - you may wish to offer closure periods more prominently than you usually would
• Getting specialist advice where you need it - medical ethics, religious sensitivities, legal implications etc. might be outside of your expertise
• Protecting yourselves and your volunteers' wellbeing by offering support

None of these methods are likely to be new to you, but it's always worth thinking them though again in the specific context of the pandemic.

Ownership, copyright etc. are complicated fields of law. These are some basic tips to help with the kind of material you are likely to want to archive in the context of the pandemic. When you are looking at collecting, think about:

• Who owns the Intellectual Property Rights?
  • Does the copyright owner know they own the copyright?
  • Is there any financial value in the item?
    • If the answer to both is 'yes', avoid sharing the item and making it digital
    • If the answer to both is 'no', the risk of breaking copyright law is low
• Permissions - Orphan works (items that have no obvious or traceable authorship)

Always make a reasonable effort to find out who owns the copyright. However, there are ways of dealing with unclear copyright. One is to have a takedown policy, which offers the option for anyone who is unhappy about their material being used to easily address that. Make sure that:

• You include a takedown policy on your website
• If the rights owner contacts you with objections, you are required to remove the item as soon as possible
• You include a statement that shows you have made every effort to make sure the materials comply with copyright
• You tell people what to do if they want to make a complaint

You can find an example takedown policy on the Norfolk Sound Archive website.

One of the most common issues with copyright for community archives is around photography. With photographs, you should remember two things:

• The copyright of a photograph is owned by the photographer or their employer, not the subject
• Owning the photograph doesn't mean owning the copyright

Donors are often confused about this, so you need to be clear. You can try to make it clearer by asking the right questions of your donors. Instead of asking if they own the copyright, you can ask:

• If they know who took the photo
• Who is shown in the photo
• Whether they have permission to give it to you

You must be aware of any personal data you collect. In law, personal data includes:

• Any information that could identify someone, such as a name, address, telephone number or email address
• Any information that could be combined to identify a person, for example a job title or health history with a location

Personal data laws only apply to people who are currently alive. However in the context of the pandemic, it's sensible and respectful that you treat people who have recently died in the same way. Consider that identifying them will also mean their families are identifiable.

Closure Periods

Records containing personal data should have a closure period, unless you have permission to share them from the person concerned. Remember, that may not be the donor of the record, and more than one person's personal data might be included in a single item.

The National Archives advises a closure period that assumes a lifetime of 100 years. This can be graduated down from the age or assumed age of the individual in the record. For example, you might have a twenty-year old photograph of a named person who looks about 70 years old, meaning if still alive they would be about 90 years old currently. This may therefore have to be closed to public access in a further ten years.

Other sensitive data

Some data is still sensitive, even if it's not protected as personal data. This might include accounts of events which were distressing for the people involved, or other people's opinions that show them in an unflattering light.

Photographs of someone are not, on their own, personal data but they would be if they are named or have other identifying features on them.

Data protection law does not prevent the taking and publication of photos. However, it is always best practice to:

• Seek permission from the subjects of photographs wherever you can
• Avoid publishing photographs where the subjects are still likely to be under the age of 18 without explicit permission
• Think about other possibilities - descriptions of other people's behaviour for instance

The next stage in making a Covid specific collection is to source the material from the community. Remember that Covid related material may be highly emotionally charged, and the form of this request should be carefully considered. There are three main routes:

• Appeals: asking people to give you things which exist already, like images, documents, objects and records
• Calls to actions: asking people to create things for your collection, including surveys, questionnaires, artwork and oral history
• Collecting yourself: gathering material directly from the public realm - for instance publications and social media

Appeals

Firstly, you could make a direct appeal to the public, or to a specific sector of the public. Appeals like this are suitable when the material already exists, and you just need the right people to know that they can offer it to you.

You need to ask a specific enough question, so that the things you are offered match your Covid collecting statement.

You'll need to think about what you want, considering things like:

• How extensive do you want the collection to be?
• Do you want a sample of the material, or the whole lot?
• If you're accepting many items, do you need the items themselves to be smaller in size? For example, are you asking for a short caption with people's photographs rather than an essay? If so, should you specify how many words?

Call to Action

Another approach is a 'call to action'. This is when you ask people to create material especially for your archive. For example, this might be by:

• Taking photographs
• Writing a diary
• Completing a survey
• Recording interviews.

The important thing is that this is material which doesn't already exist, and you are asking people to spend time creating it. You must therefore be clear, specific, and engaging in your communication.

You will also need to make sure that what you are asking for is meaningful for future researchers of the pandemic. How able you are to do this yourselves depends on the expertise available in your group. For example, a heritage group that wants to consider more creative options might find the advice of an archivist, a museum curator or a creative consultant useful.

In either case you need to set out your technical expectations. This could be around size and quantity, or for digital material it might be file type or resolution. For oral histories you will need to provide detailed instructions, and probably be able to borrow or lend out recording equipment.

Creating good appeals & calls to action

A good call to action should:

• Catch attention - 'we want you'
• Be specific - to do exactly what?
• Set a time frame - when by?
• Remember: 'who, what, when, where, how & why'

For example:
"Little Snoring History Group wants you to send us your Covid memories: download our postcard template in November to tell us what you were doing, thinking and feeling on 23 March 2020, when the first lockdown was announced"

The next step is to get your appeal or call to action out to your audience. You can use a range of media outlets depending on what reach you are looking for:

• Very local - eg, a parish newsletter, group mailing list or village forum
• Across a slightly larger locality - using borough or town resources, via the regional press for instance or a local radio station
• Open - via social media, national press and anywhere else you can

Collecting yourself

Finally, you can collect yourself, ie gathering material directly from the public realm - for instance from publications or social media. This requires staff and/or volunteer time, and a clear policy. The opportunities and pitfalls are covered more deeply under social media.

Hopefully your appeal or call to action will lead to offers of suitable donations according to your collecting statement. However, sometimes you may be offered items you don't want or can't take.

When you are offered items, consider the following questions before you decide to take them.

Do the items you are being offered fit your Covid collecting statement?

If not, you have two options:

• Decline to take them in, and refer the donor to your collecting statement
• Consider rewriting your collecting statement so that these and similar items offered in the future fit your policy. The document does not have to be set in stone, and it's possible that you made a mistake

Do you have the resources to look after them?

If you do not have the resources to take in and manage any items that are offered, you may need to turn them down. This might be because:

• You do not have the right equipment to make use of them
• You do not have the physical or digital space to store them
• They contain sensitive information, and you are not confident that you will be able keep them secure and confidential
• They require special storage and/or handling

Should they be offered to another collecting body?

If you choose to decline items, you may be able to direct them towards another organisation. This might be your local record office, museum or another community archive. This might be the best option if:

• The items form part of a larger collection held elsewhere
• They are official records which should go to a specified repository, eg, school records should go to a local authority archive
• They reference the pandemic on a regional, national or international level, rather than a local one

Social media is a potential source of archive material. It's a useful medium for recording the thoughts, opinions and discussions of all kinds of communities. It's likely to become a valuable resource for researchers as it creates a cultural record of life in the 21st Century.

Over the past couple of years, social media has been a vital tool for communities. It has helped people to keep in touch, organise mutual aid groups, and share information about issues surrounding the pandemic. You might like to consider some of this material for your Covid collection. A lot of this material is in the public realm, so you can access it yourself. This gives you a lot of control, but also a lot of the responsibility for collecting it responsibly and appropriately.

What is social media?

The huge variety of services currently available present a challenge in creating a strong definition, but there are some common features that make something 'social media':

• The medium is web-based
• The content is user-generated — including text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and usage data
• Users create service-specific profiles on the website or app, which itself is designed and maintained by the social media organisation
• The medium enables the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups

Why archive social media?

Social media allows information to be shared in an informal way. They let members of the public communicate with each other, and with organisations, in a public space. Like community archives themselves, social media gives a voice to those who might not otherwise be heard.

However, like all digital media, Social Media content is extremely vulnerable to loss:

• There are no legal requirements for a social media platform to preserve its content
• There are often changes in platform policy and ownership - platforms often shut down, for example Vine and GeoCities
• It is expensive for platforms to curate and store this data

Beyond this, some platforms advertise on the basis of the short-lived and untraceable nature of their content. They are actively trying to avoid being archived, so a question exists around the appropriacy of saving material from them.

Social Media in the Pandemic

Social media became increasingly important during a time when people had to socially distance and limit their contact with other people. These platforms are designed for people to communicate over distance and helped the world to remain connected. This means that usage greatly increased because of the pandemic.

Various people, political groups and health organisations have used social media during the pandemic to:

• Keep in touch with each other
• Spread information
• Share pandemic related information quickly to lots of people

But social media can also be risky. Direct access to content through platforms such as Twitter and YouTube leave users vulnerable to 'fake news'. This information can strongly influence the beliefs and behaviours of people. It has caused division in society and its responses to the pandemic, for example in the growth of conspiracy theories around vaccinations and lockdowns.

That makes it important to archive this information in the same way as your other pandemic records. Social media can be deleted easily, or you can be overwhelmed by how much there is to save. If you can capture a certain amount of it, however, you can provide a snapshot to future generations of how people from your particular community reacted to the pandemic, and their thoughts, concerns and behaviours. Social media helps you capture the voices of ordinary people.

Legal and ethical considerations are very important in thinking about social media - some are consistent, but some are different for different platforms.

A major difference is between material published on public, and private accounts:

• Facebook - mostly private accounts, with more personal information shared
• Twitter - more public accounts
• YouTube, Flickr etc - audio-visual content shared that may contain copyright issues
• Instagram - public and private accounts that may contain copyright issues

Ethical considerations:

• Are social media users aware of how platforms use and share their data? What are their expectations of privacy, and are they reasonable? How do you know?
• Are users aware their social media posts might be analysed for research projects? Can they give informed consent for how their data is used?

Legal issues:

• Laws and regulations increasingly demand that organisations archive social media. However social media platforms generally want to limit and restrict how this data can be used
• Social media platforms control content created by users through their terms and conditions. Platforms change their terms and conditions often - sometimes every few months. When in doubt, consult a professional archivist

Challenges to preserving social media content:

• Lack of user awareness or informed consent about what is happening to their contributions
• Potential for fraudulent use and manipulation of social media content
• Sheer volume of data and logistics to deal with
• High chance that personal data will be on display - eg names, photographs, location etc.
• Potential for people to share opinions which they may not want to have communicated further, leading to embarrassment/distress

Possible solutions:

• Decide what type of social media content you would like to collect, and add it to your organisation's collecting policy, so you are not collecting more than you need
• If you are collecting screenshots, redact any personal information eg names, pictures or other information that may identify a person
• If you are using web archiving software, stick to published websites, or limit access to your collected social media archive. Don't publish these archive posts online without permission, but you may make them available for individual researchers for research purposes only
• Seek to gain permission from social media groups where possible eg Facebook groups, Twitter users etc.

Remember, ask an archivist if you're not sure!

There are various methods of collecting social media, some more technical than others.

Less technical:

By screenshot, i.e. by simply taking a digital image of what you can see on screen when you look at a particular social media portal. You can do this by using a snipping tool like 'snip and sketch', or by using Print Screen and pasting the image into a word processing or paint file.

Advantages:

• Quick and easy to do
• Can save in the same way as your digitised images
• Allows you to be selective in what you collect

Disadvantages:

• Not useful for preserving the 'functionality' of websites, eg linking to other pages, watching video etc.
• May not automatically attach useful meta data like web address and time and date of the content creation. (Will attach the time and date of the image creation, but it is not the same thing)

To redact any personal information, you can draw black boxes over the particular information you want to hide. Then save it as a jpeg (for your access copy), or as a Tiff file (for your master or preservation copy). You can find out more about suitable file types for archiving on our digitisation training video.

More technical: using web capturing software

There are now software products on the market for collating and archiving social media content. For example, 'Conifer', which is the software we are currently recommending for community archive groups.

Advantages:

• Open source, meaning anyone can use it and there's no fee
• Preserves to archive preservation quality
• Can capture huge amounts of information
• Lots of community support, through user discussion forums etc.

Disadvantages:

• Can be time-consuming
• Requires some degree of training
• May have to do some weeding of the generated archive to meet your collecting policy

Conifer is free to start with, although you may have to pay for larger storage. It has lots of online guides and support available on how to use it. It is also pretty easy to use, you just enter the address of the web page you want to archive and press record. Conifer can also:

• Archive links to other pages
• Play video and audio
• Allow you to download documents

You will need to click on all of these whilst it is recording, so if you have a large website to archive it can be very time-consuming. It may be best to use this to capture smaller sites at regular intervals, so researchers can get an idea of how the site changed over time.

Conifer Web Archiving Software Links

Visit the Conifer website

Home: Quick Start | Conifer User Guide (rhizome.org)

GMALPS - Web Archiving Tutorial - Lesson 2 Part 2 - Conifer - YouTube

This guidance has covered:

• Deciding whether your archive group is going to collect around the pandemic
• Drafting a collection statement for a new collection or collection element
• Issuing an appeal or call to action
• Accepting or rejecting offers of material
• Understanding the issues around archiving Social Media

For more support on any of these fields, join the Norfolk Archives Network Forum.

You can view a training video on Covid collecting on the Norfolk Record Office's YouTube channel. This video will focus on the key points covered in the Covid collecting section of the Community Archives Toolkit.