Supporting and documenting the Tufts community is one of Tufts Archival Research Center's core values. We are currently documenting the COVID-19 pandemic at Tufts, and invite you to contribute.
The last time Tufts closed for a pandemic was over a hundred years ago, in fall 1918. Evidence, especially firsthand accounts, of that period in Tufts history are limited in the archives, but you could help make sure that future students, faculty, staff and scholars know what it was like to live through the COVID-19 pandemic.
To that end, we invite you to donate journals or other documentation of daily life during the pandemic. We are especially interested in stories about the shift to remote learning, displacement from student housing, impact on student or off campus jobs and other changes to your daily life.
Documentation can be in any format – handwritten or typed in a physical journal, recorded as audio or video, distributed in any kind of social media post. It can take any shape, from a traditional diary entry or a blog to a graphic novel or simply photographs or recordings documenting important moments. You can also include oral history interviews of friends and family to record how others are coping and experiencing life in this uncertain time. We can offer guidance on how to conduct ethical interviews and provide sample questions.
If you have privacy concerns, we can discuss closing the material for a period of time, so they will be available after a certain number of years, but not immediately open to the public.
If you’re interested in donating to the Tufts COVID-19 Pandemic Collection at Tufts Archival Research Center, please contact us archives@tufts.edu. Additional details and guidelines for submission are also available.
If you would like further writing prompts or suggestions for questions that could be asked in an oral history, please see our list here.
In addition to personal submissions, we will also work with University departments to transfer related records to the archives in accordance with the University Records Policy and have a COVID-19 web archiving initiative to preserve online information created at or related to Tufts.
Thank you for considering donating documentation of this extraordinary time for future generations.