I. Socially Distanced, Virtually Connected: Digital Collecting During COVID-19

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a global pandemic.¹ SARS-CoV-2, a coronavirus similar to SARS, was first identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019. China was the first country to undergo a strict lockdown to minimize the spread of the virus and its resulting respiratory disease.² In March 2020, California became the first U.S. state to declare a lockdown.³ This triggered a wave of quarantines and restrictions, with only necessary businesses still operating in person, such as grocery stores, laundromats, banks, and pharmacies.³ Within a matter of months, companies collapsed, borders were sealed, schools went remote, and over a billion people worldwide lost their jobs.⁴ Museums were caught in the middle of this sudden upheaval, as the sector was faced with closures, job losses, and virtual transitions. What were museums to do? Eighteen months later, we’re still trying to figure it out.

With physical spaces rendered useless overnight, museums were forced to find methods to stay relevant in a new, virtual world. Suddenly, institutions had to reimagine the very definition of a museum. What were they? What could they do? In a field traditionally reliant on physical exhibitions and in-person interpretation, many struggled to transition their work online.⁵ Institutions had to get creative and soon virtual initiatives were flooding the internet, from #museumsfromhome on Twitter to virtual gallery tours and Zoom programming. Former Director of the Smithsonian Arts at the Smithsonian Institution, Susan Lubowsky Talbott, stated it clearly: “Virtual programmes are now essential for maintaining audiences confined to their homes. They are quickly developed and inexpensive to launch on already existing platforms."⁶ The question of cost was key, as a lack of visitors meant many institutions faced dire budget shortages. In a national survey on the impact of COVID-19, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) found that 33% of institutions were worried that they would have to close their doors forever if they were left without some form of financial assistance.⁷

Despite strict restrictions and financial burdens, memory institutions like museums, libraries, and archives were needed more than ever to collect and commemorate the unprecedented events of the COVID-19 pandemic. But how can you collect and connect during a time of social distancing and physical isolation? Museums around the world turned to their communities to address this problem, starting digital outreach campaigns that encouraged the donation and submission of objects. Museums specifically relied on born-digital materials, such as photos, typed reflections, videos, and audio, which were easy to submit online and didn’t rely on in-person interaction. In this article, I will look at how institutions enacted COVID-19 collecting initiatives that melded community collecting, rapid collecting, and participatory practices into a new, virtual format. In particular, I will examine submission portals to evaluate how institutions formatted their requests for content and identify the key components of a collecting project. When the need arises again, what can museums learn from COVID-19 collecting in order to quickly roll out clear, effective, and thoughtful programs?

Even before COVID-19, museums have been preoccupied with the problem of falling visitor rates. In 2008, the National Endowment of the Arts Survey of the Public Participation in the Arts identified a crisis of culture. They found that “audiences for museums, galleries, and performing arts have decreased, and the audiences that remain are older and whiter than the overall population.”⁸ In her book, The Participatory Museum, Nina Simon offers a solution to this problem: engage with the public, invite them in, and allow them to actively participate in learning and meaning-making. With COVID-19 rendering in-person visitation non-existent, many museums have adopted Simon’s participatory approach, endeavoring to make their institutions more engaging by reaching out to digital audiences and inviting them to interact on social media or join collecting projects. What sets participatory museums apart is that “information flows between institutions and users” and community members are respected as sources of information and inspiration.⁹ Participatory projects, like digital collecting initiatives, can “make relationships among staff members, visitors, community participants, and stakeholders more fluid and equitable,” and this relationship building is especially valuable during a time of social isolation.¹⁰ Collecting initiatives are what Simon labels “me-to-we initiatives” which empower visitors to create content that will enhance the experience of others. This is done by “[coordinating] individuals’ actions and preferences to create a useful and interesting collective result.”¹¹ By encouraging visitors to share their stories of the pandemic, museums are not only preserving objects for the historical record but also fostering a sense of community among their audience.

While COVID-19 collecting projects rely on audience participation, they are also informed by the practices of community collecting and rapid response collecting. These two collecting strategies existed long before 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic created the perfect environment for common adoption. Focusing on contemporary events, community collecting and rapid response collecting methods deny the museum’s traditional passive donation strategy and instead take an active role in shaping collections. In community collecting, community members are empowered to identify and collect objects that they find valuable and representative. Museums around the world have expressed their intent to become more accessible and more representative, and community collecting has revealed itself to be a radically democratic solution that privileges the knowledge and experience of the many over the “expertise” of the few. The time frame of this collective effort is sped up when combined with rapid response collecting. As the name suggests, rapid response collecting focuses on short bursts of collecting, usually in reaction to sudden, dramatic, and historically valent moments. This collecting methodology arose in response to the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City,¹² where the New-York Historical Society created the “History Responds” initiative to quickly collect and preserve objects from the event.¹³ These two methods are not commonly combined, as building relationships with communities requires a large time investment that rapid collecting can’t afford. For this reason, most time-sensitive rapid collecting efforts are led by curators and topic experts. Considering the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, community collecting and rapid response collecting become more powerful in combination, as they utilize broad community knowledge to build an image of the present moment.

With the emergence of COVID-19, museums needed to quickly reach out and make connections with their communities to identify meaningful stories and solicit donations. To do this, museums of all sizes and budgets took advantage of social media. In an article for the American Alliance of Museums, Anne Raymond, Board Member for the Unionville Museum in Connecticut, explains how her small institution utilized social media to begin a rapid response collecting project that directly involved the local community. Of the program, Raymond says “Living through this historic event now gives us and others working in local history an opportunity to start collecting relevant primary sources immediately.”¹⁴ Working with the resources they had, the Museum posted a request for “photographs and stories about the effects of the virus” on their website and Facebook page.¹⁴ The posts directed community members to submit their content in an email. Needing only a Facebook and Gmail account, the museum was able to kickstart their community collecting project one day after the governor’s shutdown order.¹⁴ In reflecting on the impacts of this project, Raymond noted that they were not only able to grow their collection, but also stay connected to their community during a time of isolation, increase awareness of the museum, engage a younger audience, and increase the institution’s use of social media.¹⁴

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Despite a difference in resources and scale, all the museums I evaluated for this article utilized their Facebook pages in order to kickstart COVID-19 collecting projects. The similarities in these cases reveal that museums need only two things to create these virtual initiatives: a way to reach people, and a place for them to submit their content.

While social media was the main format used by museums to reach out to their audiences, submission methods varied widely between institutions. With little precedence, differences in approach and technique emerged as museums tried to identify the best approach to digital collecting in their communities. In this section, I will compare and contrast the submission pages of three mid-sized museums: the Chicago History Museum, the Museum of Ventura County in California, and the Museum of the Home in London. While museums can make do with directing submissions to an email account, as in the case of the Unionville Museum, a website allows museums to situate the project within the context of their institution. Submission portals also allow museums to structure the information they are receiving, enabling them to request specific data to enrich the submission. These three museums have similar missions and scopes that support such reflective, contemporary collecting programs. Despite this, they all have distinct focuses, perspectives, and serve different communities, from metropolitan cities to large counties and international communities.

As these submissions will be preserved in perpetuity as archival materials, museums must not only have a close relationship with their audience but also explain and describe how the project will provide long-term benefits to the community. To this point, the first adjective the Chicago History Museum uses to define its collecting project, In This Together, is “community-based.” ¹⁵ They note that the historical benefit of collecting personal reflections is that they “provide depth and context for what an event or era was like for the everyday people experiencing it.”¹⁵ The Museum of Ventura County’s COVID-19: Rapid Response Collecting program takes a similar approach, first emphasizing the historic nature of the current moment before stating “Capturing these stories today will help future generations understand what life in Ventura County has been like during a global pandemic.” ¹⁶ These two museums focus on preserving a sense of place and time, as their museums focus on the history of their geographic regions. The Museum of the Home, on the other hand, has a more symbolic focus, which is represented in the language they use to define this project. With the refrain “our homes have never been more important,” the Museum of the Home does not spend a lot of time explaining its Stay Home collecting project, rather immediately directing visitors to explore their archive and collected stories.¹⁷ Perhaps there is no need to convince the audience of the truth of this statement; many have been stuck at home due to the pandemic and the importance of “Home” may be self-evident. But this experience was not universal and essential workers who provided indispensable in-person services may interpret this sentiment differently.

When it comes to content, all three museums specifically request digital photographs alongside written reflections such as journal entries. The Chicago History Museum and Museum of Ventura County also add oral histories and video recordings to their list. While digital materials are the focus of these collecting projects, the Chicago History Museum also links to their donation inquiry form for physical material and the Museum of Ventura County has a section detailing the physical objects they intend to collect “when it is safe,” including masks, takeout menus, home lesson plans, grocery lists, and signs.¹⁶ All three museums post selected reflections online for the public to browse and include links to these pages in their submission portal. By posting submissions online, museums give donors a sense that they are having a direct impact, adding to the historical record, and participating in a collective program.

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So how do you go about actually submitting your content? All three take a similar approach, although executed differently. The Chicago History Museum is the simplest, first requesting that donors upload materials to Box, a cloud-based file-sharing system, or enter content into a text box. They then request information about when and where the content was created and how the donor would like to be identified publicly. After that, it’s a quick read through the terms and conditions before clicking submit. The Museum of Ventura County is a little more circuitous in design. The donor is directed to the research library website where they must choose from a dropdown menu whether they would like to submit a story, photograph, video, “sign, poster, pamphlet or other object”, or oral history.¹⁶ Each option brings up a different list of questions, specific to the item format, and a way to upload media. While it is an exhaustive way to collect metadata about the submission, the information they are requesting is not always clear. In many cases, each prompt is phrased two separate ways. For example, when submitting a photograph, one text box is labeled both “provide details about what –or who– it depicts” and “The topic of the resource,” figure 4. The donor is left to guess at the meaning, which at best would create a variety of interpretations in data and at worst would disincentivize donors from completing their submission.

The Museum of the Home has a slightly different structure, although it mirrors the fundamental ideas of the other museums. The page first prompts donors to respond to 7 questions about their home, like “How does staying at home affect your relationships?” and “Has lockdown changed your habits or routines at home?.”¹⁷ The next page asks for five photos of the donor’s home and a description of the photos. Finally, the last page requests demographic information about gender, age, and location, before asking that the donor agrees to the Archive Agreement. With little introduction, these intimate questions come off as personal inquiries into the donor’s life, especially as it is unclear whether a donor can choose to skip a question or keep certain information private. While these prompts may help the donor stay on topic, the Museum of the Home chooses not to address how personal they seem, only acknowledging that the demographic questions might be “a little personal, but it is really useful to us.”¹⁷

While I do not have access to data about the number of submissions each institution received, their posted submissions can be used as a rough measure. While this is not perfect, it is useful in imagining the overall volume of submissions to each project. The Chicago History Museum features 58 collected stories, the Museum of Ventura County 5, and the Museum of the Home 85. Despite its county-wide scale, the Museum of Ventura County has significantly fewer posted submissions and one reason for this may be their portal. By asking unclear questions, the museum puts many steps between the donor and the submit button. If a donor has to stop and puzzle over the meaning of a prompt then they may lose motivation or quit in frustration. In comparison, the Chicago History Museums only asks a few, clear, and key questions to enrich the donated material and the Museum of the Home guides donors through three pages of simple questions and submission portals.

While these numbers are certainly interesting, it’s also valuable to evaluate the trends within this data. All three museums collected geographic area information, but the Chicago History Museum used this data to make a map of their donors’ locations. In July of 2020, Chicago Magazine observed that, in the map of submissions, “nearly every entry is from the North Side or the suburbs. The one South Side submission is from Hyde Park, and there are none from the West Side”.¹⁸ This omission of historically neglected Black and Latino communities reveals that this project is not reaching a diverse audience. Using the data to its advantage, the museum notes that it intends to conduct outreach to these underrepresented zip codes.¹⁸

This is a good time to mention that, when it comes to community projects, one museum does not have to do it all. In her piece for Chicago Magazine, Moore turns to highlight the work of The Blackivists, a collective of archivists in Chicago who are responding to the systemic underrepresentation of Black communities in the historical record by prioritizing Black cultural heritage preservation and memory work.¹⁹ This highlights a key element of community collecting - for the community to respond to you, you must put in the work to earn trust and respond to historical patterns of exclusion. The individuals who will submit reflections are those who feel comfortable and familiar with the institution. This trust will not appear, fully formed, in the moment of a crisis. The work has to be done beforehand.

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In creating a participatory museum project, Nina Simon identifies three necessary elements, “The institution must promise an appealing participant experience. The institution must provide access to tools for participation that are easy to understand and use. And the bargain between institution and participants—regarding management of intellectual property, outcomes of the project, and feedback to the participants—should accommodate participants’ needs."²⁰ And while we’ve seen the importance of the tool, the submission portal, it’s also important to consider the bargain made by these collecting initiatives. Museums offer donors the opportunity to have their stories posted on the museum’s website and this bargain is functionally fulfilled. But, once posted, these submissions seem to sit unused. This is not a satisfying or sustainable outcome for a participatory community project. There is only one real dimension to this work, the creation of the object, and this is the fundamental flaw of submission portals. Beyond the single submission, there is no further life for the project, no continuing opportunity to engage. Imagining participation only as content creation is narrow and limits not only the project but also the portion of the community engaged. Only 24% of people engage with social media as creators, while others act as critics, collectors, joiners, and spectators.²¹ How will museums access these sections of their audience? A straightforward way would be to enable likes, reactions, and tags on the community submission page. Museums can also experiment with having a submission portal always open, which allows them to be constantly available. If necessary, the museum can craft questions to capture experiences of current events. This transforms the project into a living time capsule that can have usefulness beyond the present moment.

While rarely acknowledged, the COVID-19 pandemic was a traumatic event that impacted everyone’s lives. While these collecting projects are important, institutions need to think about how they will handle personal topics and, as stated in the Contemporary Collecting Toolkit, museums should have “procedures in place so that staff and public participants know what to expect and what kind of support might be available to them."²² While “museums can play a role in healing processes” with collections work, “it is important to remember that museums can be exploitative institutions and that the act of collecting can, even today, be experienced as extractive.”²³

In reviewing these COVID-19 collecting portals, it becomes clear that participatory community collecting initiatives are built on trust. Museums have to be constantly engaging with their local communities, encouraging and fostering closer relationships all the time. In this way, when rapid collecting or community collecting initiatives are necessary, they can be linked to preexisting networks of communication and outreach. Collecting projects from institutions like the Unionville Museum, the Chicago History Museum, the Museum of Ventura County, and the Museum of the Home all provide important lessons on building submission standards, but to make these experiences truly participatory, truly relational, we must go beyond the submission portal and imagine a museum built on ever-evolving community knowledge. By doing this, we can not only create a more equitable museum for communities of the present but also build a representative historical record for the future.

Notes

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1. Adhanom, Tedros. “WHO Director-General’s Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19 - 11 March 2020.” Presented at the Media Briefing on COVID-19, Geneva, March 11, 2020. https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020. ↩︎

2. Katella, Kathy. “Our Pandemic Year—A COVID-19 Timeline.” Yale Medicine, March 9, 2021. https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-timeline. ↩︎

3. Arango, Tim, and Jill Cowan. “Gov. Gavin Newsom of California Orders Californians to Stay at Home.” The New York Times, March 19, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/California-stay-at-home-order-virus.html. ↩︎

4. Ray, Julie. “COVID-19 Put More Than 1 Billion Out of Work.” Gallup, May 3, 2021. https://news.gallup.com/poll/348722/covid-put-billion-work.aspx. ↩︎

5. Faheem, Fatima. “How Museums Are Revitalizing In Times Of Covid-19 Crisis?” Countercurrents (blog), February 3, 2021. https://countercurrents.org/2021/03/how-museums-are-revitalizing-in-times-of-covid-19-crisis/. ↩︎

6. Lubowsky Talbott, Susan. “Museums Must Adopt New Models to Respond to the Covid-19 Pandemic.” The Art Newspaper, April 24, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/04/24/museums-must-adopt-new-models-to-respond-to-the-covid-19-pandemic. ↩︎

7. Di Liscia, Valentina. “One-Third of US Museums May Never Reopen, Says American Alliance of Museums.” Hyperallergic, July 24, 2020. http://hyperallergic.com/578563/aam-survey-one-third-museums-reopen/. ↩︎

8. Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. (Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010), i. ↩︎

9. Simon 2010, 2. ↩︎

10. Simon 2010, 3. ↩︎

11. Simon 2010, 86. ↩︎

12. Debono, Sandro. “Collecting Pandemic Phenomena: Reflections on Rapid Response Collecting and the Art Museum.” Collections 17, no. 2 (June 1, 2021): 179–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/1550190620980844. ↩︎

13. New-York Historical Society Museum & Library. “History Responds to COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter: Highlights of Recent Acquisitions.” Behind The Scenes (blog), August 6, 2020. https://behindthescenes.nyhistory.org/history-responds-to-covid-19-and-black-lives-matter-highlights-from-our-recent-acquisitions/. ↩︎

14. Raymond, Anne. “A Small Museum’s Rapid Response Collecting Project for COVID-19.” American Alliance of Museums (blog), April 16, 2020. https://www.aam-us.org/2020/04/16/a-small-museums-rapid-response-collecting-project-for-covid-19/. ↩︎

15. Chicago History Museum. “In This Together.” Chicago History Museum. Accessed September 15, 2021. https://www.chicagohistory.org/covid19history/. ↩︎

16. Museum of Ventura County. “COVID-19: Rapid Response Collecting.” Museum of Ventura County. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://venturamuseum.org/covid-19-rapid-response-collecting/. ↩︎

17. Museum of the Home. “How Our Home Lives Are Changing during the Coronavirus Pandemic.” Accessed September 19, 2021. https://www.museumofthehome.org.uk/explore/stay-home-collecting-project/. ↩︎

18. Moore, Taylor. “How Will History Museums Remember This Moment?” Chicago Magazine, July 31, 2020. https://www.chicagomag.com/arts-culture/July-2020/COVID-19-protests-history-museums/. ↩︎

19. The Blackivists. “Our Purpose.” The Blackivists. Accessed October 26, 2021. https://www.theblackivists.com. ↩︎

20. Simon 2010, 17. ↩︎

21. Simon 2010, 8. ↩︎

22. Cordner, Susanna. “Trauma and Distress: Introduction.” In Contemporary Collecting Toolkit, edited by Ellie Miles, Susanna Cordner, and Jen Kavanagh, 22. London: London Transport Museum, 2020. ↩︎

23. Tuttle, Matt, and Jess Tuttle. “Working with Trauma.” In Contemporary Collecting Toolkit, edited by Ellie Miles, Susanna Cordner, and Jen Kavanagh, 23–26. London: London Transport Museum, 2020. ↩︎