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Seton Hall University

Covid Oral History Project at Seton Hall to Be Featured in College & Research Libraries News  

WalshA campus oral history project to record the experiences of Seton Hall University's students, staff, and faculty during the pandemic is the subject of a feature article in College & Research Libraries News (Vol 81, No 6, June forthcoming).

The article, written by Marta Mestrovic Deyrup and Sarah Ponichtera, details the initiative, which will archive for historians, scholars and posterity "the experiences of the university's staff, students, and faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic," along with "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."

By detailing and archiving the experience, historians and social scientists will have access to contemporaneous first-person accounts of life at the onset of a pandemic.

By detailing the procedures, the article may function as a template or roadmap for other social scientists and archivists who may also wish to leverage modern technology and collection methodology to chronicle the experiences of a particular group or subset within the population.

Professor, librarian and Fulbright Specialist Marta M. Deyrup, Ph.D., notes of this latest publication and project: "In the long term, projects such as Seton Hall's will someday allow future historians to build digital humanities projects contextualizing and analyzing the history of this moment. We have in mind projects such as the National Archives Catalog's coverage of Spanish Influenza and the University of Michigan's Center for the History of Medicine's massive database, the American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: a Digital Encyclopedia."

Co-author and Assistant Dean of Special Collections and the Gallery Sarah Ponichtera, Ph.D., agreed, "Sometimes collecting historical materials looks like collecting the letters or photographs of someone at the 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."

Conceived by Provost Karen Boroff, the project moved forward at the behest of John Buschman, dean of Seton Hall University Libraries.

The design and implementation team consisted of Sarah Ponichtera; Elizabeth Leonard, assistant dean for information technologies and collection services; Sharon Ince, digital services librarian; Sheridan Sayles, technical services archivist; and Angela Kotsonis, faculty member from the Department of Communication served as an advisor to the project.

The initiative is ongoing, and those within the Seton Hall community who would like to share their experiences of COVID-19, documenting how they have lived through this moment of history, are encouraged to do so through brief submissions to the Personal Narratives Project.

Participants are asked to "record a 1-3 minute narrative about your experience, using any video or audio equipment available to you" and to submit along with an "image that represents your narrative, which will appear next to your recording in the published archive."

"As librarians, archivists and members of a community deeply affected by this pandemic we have a duty to record this moment in time for future generations," said Dean Buschman. "The Spanish Influenza was more than 100 years ago, but those who took the time to record in the midst of that devastation gave us insight into this one."

Stories, especially those that are contributed by the class of 2020, will be highlighted on social media over the coming weeks. More information on Seton Hall's COVID experience can be found here »

Categories: Arts and Culture

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