Documenting Covid 19 at Ferris State University

How can I help collect the archives of the future?

Ferris State University Archives is documenting the experiences of Ferris students, staff, faculty, and other members of the campus community during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and contributing them to the Ferris State University Archives. We invite you to share your stories, photos, videos, and other documentation about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. We have no records of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and would like to make sure we have records of the current historic period.

How to participate

We are interested in your stories about the shift to remote instruction and learning, studying and working from home, working at on-campus and off-campus jobs, the impact of closing residence halls and other campus services, the ways you and your friends and family are staying in touch during this period of social distancing and self-quarantine, the emotional impact of the pandemic, and so on. How you record your thoughts and experiences is up to you. For instance, you can write in a journal, record voice memos, save your social media posts, take photos and/or videos of life as you see it, or create multimedia works of digital storytelling.

Submission Process

Please use the attached form to submit your items. Your email address will not be shared or sold. You will be able to sign an agreement allowing the Ferris State University Archives to preserve your submission, and you will receive important information about the copyright and use of your content. The archives can accept a wide variety of formats, including photos (jpg, png, tiff), Videos (mp4, mov), Audio (mp3), and Text (txt, pdf, docx, doc). Larger video files make take several minutes to load. Files larger than 1 gigabyte will need to be sent in multiple packages. If you are unsure about something in particular, or do not have a Ferris email, please email [email protected] for assistance.

If you interview other people in the course of your documentation, we will also need their permission so that we can preserve and share the recordings with future researchers. Please have any friends, family members, or community members fill out the Google form if you wish to record with them. If we do not receive releases from all participants we cannot preserve the materials. But only one person will need to attach the files to the form -- co-creators can simply fill in their personal information along with a description of the materials. Submissions will not be available to the public immediately. They will be made available following review and processing by the archives.

Acknowledgements

This form and organization is based largely upon the Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections and collaboration with many other college and university archives in the United States.