Documenting COVID-19 at the University of South Carolina

Your experience during COVID-19 is unique and valuable. Please share it with us.
When campus shut down in March, we had no idea how much it was going to change our lives.

Our new, normal daily routines of virtual teaching, learning, and working in quarantine and isolation have made for an unprecedented time in our university’s history.

We’d like to preserve your COVID-19 experiences
South Caroliniana Library is building a permanent digital collection, Documenting COVID-19 at the University of South Carolina, to tell the story of the personal impact of COVID-19 on students, faculty, and staff. We need your help to build it.

We are living through a historical event. Future researchers will want evidence of the university community’s response to the pandemic and how it changed our lives.

We have very little evidence that documents the day-to-day lives of people who witnessed similar past events, like the 1918 – 1919 influenza pandemic. Technology now allows us to realize the opportunity to collect personal stories while we are dealing with COVID-19.

We need you to contribute to this archive
We’re asking you to submit digital materials that represent your life during COVID-19, so they can become part of our online archive.

We’re looking for digital content you’ve created since campus shut down, including:

Photos, videos, artwork, and music
Screenshots of social media posts, and other digital storytelling formats
Class papers, projects or presentations that address COVID-19
Journal entries, poetry, and any other writings
While we can accept most file formats, please submit the highest resolution or largest file size possible.

Get started
If you’d like to contribute, but aren’t sure where to start, you could answer any of these questions in any format you choose:

What has it been like learning, teaching, or working virtually?
How has the closure of residence halls, campus services, or buildings affected you?
How has the quarantine, isolation, and social distancing affected your life and relationships with family and friends?
Why this matters
As part of our mission to acquire, preserve and facilitate the use of South Carolina research materials of all kinds and from all periods, we’ve prioritized this as an urgent collecting need.

Documenting COVID-19 at the University of South Carolina will contribute to the understanding of how the university managed the logistical, technological, economic and psychological challenges posed by a 21st-century pandemic, how it impacted students, faculty, and staff, and how we responded.