As the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh archivist, Joshua Ranger has spent more than 20 years collecting and preserving the materials that document everyday life on campus as well as the University’s most important decisions, policies and critical moments.
One of those moments is happening now.
“Based on the absolute unprecedented nature of the worldwide response to COVID-19, it is clearly a moment of historic significance,” Ranger said.
“As an archivist in charge of telling the story of our community, what I wouldn’t give to have some letters of students to their families describing their feelings and fears, directives to faculty on how to deal with the loss of weeks of instruction and first-person descriptions of how school events changed.”
People relate best to artifacts of everyday life—a sorority rush invitation from the 1930s, a list of dormitory rules from 1951 or photographs of faculty boat outings from the 1970. But often these are the types of items we don’t think to save.
“I think one of the mistakes people make in not preserving their own records is that they think they are never living through history or at least they are never part of it,” Ranger said. “This doesn’t mean that everything we create is worth saving, but if no one saves the everyday things, we lose really important understanding on how people lived. And history books are full of educated speculation when the authors would prefer they had documentation.”
Lessons from 1918
That’s what may have happened during the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 and early 1919.
“It is true that certain events may not seem historic while they are happening, particularly at the beginning. The Spanish Flu epidemic may have been one of those times,” he said.
Histories written about the Spanish Flu all share a common theme: despite its incredible destructiveness, the flu has largely been “forgotten” by societies across the globe.
“There are several reasons historians provide for this, from the synchronous ending of World War I and the great feelings of sadness and shame people felt after the pandemic was over,” Ranger explained.
The impact of the Spanish Flu locally was documented in a 2001 UWO project. While the Oshkosh Normal School closed twice for the Spanish flu, records of the impact are scarce.
“The 1919 school yearbook The Quiver contains only one mention of the flu in relation to a truncated football schedule. The annual euphemistically listed the two school closures simply as Thanksgiving and Christmas recesses, ignoring the reasons why these breaks were a month long each,” Ranger said.
The University archives also have no administrative records from that time.
“If any records documenting the school’s decisions and policies about this time were ever created they are lost to time. It is unfortunate as we have little understanding of what life was like then on and around campus, and so we lose part of our connection to those people,” he said.
That’s why Ranger recommends preserving artifacts from the current health crisis.
Save artifacts of everyday life
“Don’t throw out or delete things you are creating or receiving that capture how you are spending your time and dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. In the end, these could accumulate into a unique collection of material to look back on or donate to an archives at a future time,” he said.
Items to consider saving include copies of emails to a supervisor about how working from home is going (make sure you are not violating company email policies) or communications with a child’s teacher on how classes will continue.
Ranger said keeping a journal is another way to document current events, but he warns that it is important to be honest and resist offering a “hero’s edit.”
“Like the diaries of the past, these are sources where we can find both details of people’s behavior and their feelings,” he added.
Ranger offers the following tips to preserve documents:
- Keep a folder handy and put paper materials in there you think might tell the story of your experience.
- As the situation continues, it might be important to date things beyond the year since things are changing so fast.
- When necessary, date materials in a corner with brackets (e.g. [April 6, 2020] )
- When possible, use pencil which likely will have fewer problems over the years than ink.
- Avoid tapes, glues and other adhesives.
- Once the outbreak is over, label your folder and keep it somewhere safe from heat, light and humidity.
- For digital records, use a folder and subfolders to organize digital photos, offlined emails and other document.
- Save digital records in common formats like .pdf and .jpg, and rename the files to describe easily what they are. Create .txt files that provided additional information about the saved items.
- Digital records needed to be backed up and moved as you change equipment. You also can consider saving them to a cloud drive with other important records, photographs, etc.
At home, Ranger is taking steps to preserve his own family’s experience during the pandemic.
“I am being sure to take quality photographs of how we are spending our days—our workspaces, our daily walks, our toilet paper collection— so I have a visual record of how we are spending our days during COVID-19,” he said.
Ranger also has signed up for the Wisconsin Historical Society’s COVID-19 Journaling project that asks Wisconsinites to keep a 30-, 60- or 90-day journal. He encourages others to take part at https://wisconsinhistory.org/records/Article/CS16333 by preserving their experiences in written, video or audio form.
“You can share a summary of your days and over time document how the pandemic has impacted your life, your family and your perspective of the world,” he said.
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