When we began our COVID-19 collecting, the various Culture on Campus teams were thinking individually about what they intended to capture. The University's own institutional archive should capture the effect this period had on staff and students, the NHS Forth Valley Archive was concerned with reflecting the experiences of the region, the Scottish Political Archive wanted to examine the impact across Scotland as a whole.
After initially collecting separately, all these strands have been pulled together to create the Pandemic Archive. The Pandemic Archive will contain everything that has been gathered through our contemporary collecting since March 2020. It will inevitably link out to many other archive collections that we hold here at the University of Stirling and it will complement the information contained therein.
The Pandemic Archive is currently being catalogued. This in progress catalogue, containing the full oral history collection, can be browsed here.
In the University Archives and Special Collections, we have been looking for ways to document the strange times we have all been through since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and, to some extent, continue to live in.
Contemporary Collecting is a practise which many galleries, museums and archive took up during the pandemic, especially during the national lockdowns. It is a way of calling out for specific material to fill in a gap or evidence a particular event/period/theme etc. rather than waiting to see what is naturally donated to the archive which might cover the same information. In this way you can capture ephemera which is often lost, bring focus and diversity to collections and prevent gaps in the record - for example, one of the main reasons we began our COVID Collecting is because of the lack of information we have on the 1918 Flu Pandemic in our medical archives. We know this has been a big research gap in our existing collections.
We have been running the below contemporary collecting strands to provide a personal account of this period in history. Often it is personal accounts contained in the archive which researchers find striking, perhaps because it is such a rare glimpse behind the curtain of the official facts and figures and timelines. The below main strands were developed so that members of our University community and the community of Forth Valley, where the University lives, can come together to tell history.
Diaries
In 2020 when we first started collecting, we encouraged members of the Forth Valley community and the University community to create diaries documenting their daily lives during the pandemic and particularly the first UK national lockdown. Our guide to creating a diary can still be found below though we anticipate that any diaries donated from now on will be back dated. Information on how to donate your diary to the archive can be found below also.
If you did not write a diary during this period but think you might like to write a piece which reflects on this time for you, we are still accepting written submissions to the archive. The guide to writing Lockdown Diaries will help you if you need prompting.
Images
We are also collecting images that will help to illustrate the reality of this period. We imagine these will mainly take the form of photographs but if drawing is your thing then go for it! We would like images of anything that you think will help to illustrate the practical realities of this period for future generations. This could be information posters, markers on floors and pavements, physically distant queuing at shops, empty streets, boarded up shop fronts or the gap on the shop shelves where you hoped your product of choice would be. What about all the amazing rainbows in people's windows! So many of us were taking these photographs on our daily walk and still have them on our phones. Why not donate them to the archive using this quick and simple form.
You can see a selection of images which have already been deposited here.
Videos of #ClapForNHS
We are collecting any videos you may have of the weekly 'Clap For NHS' (which had a variety of affiliated hashtags such as #ClapForCarers or #ClapForKeyWorkers). This was a weekly occurrence during primarily the first UK national lockdown. If any of you took videos during the Thursday night pot-banging and pipe-playing then we’d love to see them. You can also deposit these using that handy online form.
Ephemera
We are collecting tangible forms of public advice and guidance which was produced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic - from official and unofficial sources at a local level. This material might relate to the medical treatment for or vaccinations against COVID-19, the varying restrictions put in place in your local area in response to COVID-19, communications from the government (Westminster and Holyrood) regarding COVID-19 etc.
These forms of documentation will eventually become part of the University's Pandemic Archive which will have connections to many other of our collections - the NHS Forth Valley Archive, the Scottish Political Archive and the University's own records to name but a few. The Pandemic Archive will be used by a wide range of researchers so please be respectful of others while you create and document.
Please note that your contribution to the archive can remain anonymous if you wish.
Any questions can be directed to the Archive team at archives@stir.ac.uk.
26.03.2020 The first call-out for COVID-19 material
29.03.2020 Inspiration from the Peter Mackay archive
21.04.2020 The Scottish Political Archive calls out for material
09.09.2022 Keep a Stir Diary - diary writing for University of Stirling students
15.12.2020 Want to know more about contemporary collecting? This is the blog post for you!
11.05.2021 We receive funding to create an oral history project
16.07.2021 Create history with the Archives
01.03.2022 Recruiting students to join the oral history project team
22.04.2022 Our placement student reflects on working with COVID-19 oral history interviews
20.05.2022 Students, get involved!
For subscribers of History Scotland magazine, you can find an article about our oral history project in Vol. 22, No. 2 pages 44-45
The University Pandemic Oral History project is run collaboratively by staff in Archives and Special Collections, the department of History, Heritage and Politics and the University Art Collection. In April 2021, the Vice Chancellor's Fund provided a generous contribution towards the project, allowing it to come to life.
The project is interviewing University staff and students about their experiences living, working and studying through the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the years 2020 and 2021. These oral history interviews are recorded and kept in the University Pandemic Archive to be used for future research, storytelling and historical narrative.
University staff are being interviewed by the project team - Dr Stephen Bowman, Sarah Bromage and Rosie Al-Mulla - while the students and recent graduates are being interviewed by a small team of interviewers who are, themselves, current students at the University.
The interviewing of staff and students is ongoing and we are happy for any expressions of interest in being interviewed for the project. We require that
- Staff worked at the University for a minimum of twelve weeks at any point between March 2020 and March 2022
- Students began their studies at the University on or before 1st October 2020
This is so that we can meaningfully discuss the effect that the pandemic had on individuals' usual pursuits at the University. We would love to see as broad a range of staff and students represented as possible.
There are some FAQs about the project here, please do email Rosie on rosie.al-mulla@stir.ac.uk if you have further questions. There are also various blog posts detailing the project linked on the right hand column of this page.
The money which was granted by the Vice Chancellor's Fund will be used to create an end-of-project film which we hope will include clips of interviews and will make use of the material deposited with us through the above contemporary collecting strands. The finished film will be shown in an exhibition in collaboration with the University's Art Collection as part of their year of Human Experience (2024-2025).
Remembering Together is a national initiative, exploring the co-creation of community memorials representing the COVID-19 pandemic. Ran by Greenspace Scotland and partnered in the Stirling area by Scene Stirling, the project aims to create space for communities to reflect, absorb, discuss and interpret the pandemic. In the first stage of the project, artist Saffy Setohy conducted a series of workshops across Stirling, inviting participants to take part in mindful and creative activities that would explore the kind of memorial that might best represent Stirling. The memorials that come out of the Remembering Together project will be as unique as the communities which contributed to their making and may well not be the kind of thing we automatically think of when we explore memorials in our own mind's eye.
In November 2022 Saffy brought a workshop to the University of Stirling and worked with members of the oral history project team and a number of those who have been interviewed for the project for an afternoon where we shared experiences, reflections and created together.
The culmination of all these workshops was an exhibition of work produced by the various participants at St. Ninian's Library in Stirling. The next phases of Remembering Together are ongoing and will continue into 2024.
In the meantime, material from the workshop held at the University of Stirling in November 2022 joins the Pandemic Archive to evidence the University's ongoing interactions with and reflections on the pandemic.
The project team (l-r) Katharina, Duncan, Sarah, Rosie, Callum, Nicky, Stephen. Not pictured, Tomasz.
