If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
May 14, 2020 5:42 AM   Subscribe

Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic.
A public historical archive documenting how the extreme new conditions are changing the routines, expectations, and dreams of people from all walks of life, nationalities, communities, genders, and aged groups across the globe. Archives have to be made.
A doctoral student from Colombo, Sri Lanka. A winemaker in Denman, Australia. An ultra-marathoner from Piracicaba, Brazil. A retired special ed. administrator from Normal, IL.
Go ahead and Share your Story.
posted by adamvasco (4 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Ugh ugh what stresses me out so much is how many of these projects exist out there in universities/libraries/museums that will face significant cuts in the immediate future and not have the ability to sustain these complex digital archives over the long term. That is why I strongly encourage my team not support one.
posted by avocet at 7:30 PM on May 14, 2020


As an archivist I have really weird feelings about archives projects at institutions that have tons of archivists at them but no apparent involvement of archivists themselves. I wish people would call these story collections - if you don't have a preservation plan or infrastructure in place, please reconsider why you are choosing to use the phrase archive without involving actual archivists.
posted by mostly vowels at 7:37 PM on May 14, 2020 [1 favorite]


Not sure where people are seeing that this project doesn't have a preservation plan or involvement by archivists. (I know there are none listed on the people page, which is not great, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been input by them). I know people who have been on the CESTA team at Stanford in the past, and some people tangentially connected with them now. I'm pretty sure it has a close (though admittedly complex) relationship with the university library. As far as I know, the digital projects CESTA does all have data management and preservation plans, and as far as long term institutional support goes, while the university sector is in a crisis right now, Stanford is probably one of the safer bets.
posted by lollusc at 12:21 AM on May 15, 2020


lollusc, my comment was directed at just how many of these projects popped up over the last two months and mobilized with such speed that effective sunset planning couldn't be done. This is probably the 40th similarly-scoped initiative I've seen – no joke. Most archivists, especially in the digital realm, would take more than one week (the amount of time before I was approached with Making One of These Happen) and even more than two months to mobilize on this, if digital preservation and graceful sunsetting of projects was a factor.
posted by avocet at 5:38 AM on May 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


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