National and Regional Collections

Poster with drawn image of a woman in scrubs, with a face mask, and afro. Text states "She is the culture and she is saving the world." — Phillips, Teddy, artist. *She the Culture and She is Saving the World.* [Seattle], Amplifier, 2020. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

What will Americans know about the COVID-19 pandemic one hundred years from now? How will our great-grandchildren understand what Americans experienced during the pandemic? How did people's experiences with COVID-19 differ based on where they lived, their work, and/or their identities? Thanks to the tireless efforts of individuals and organizations in the United States, a wealth of primary source materials exists to answer these questions.

Below are collections outside of the Library of Congress which focus on COVID-19 experiences from national, state, and regional perspectives. These collections provide a living archive of COVID-19 stories and an opportunity to look deeply at how individuals experienced COVID-19 differently. These materials elucidate the lived experiences of medical workers, teachers, musicians, and other Americans whose lives were affected by COVID-19. Some also highlight the experiences of specific communities—such as African Americans in the Deep South or the Chinese diaspora in the United States.

Do you have a collection that you would like to add to this research guide? If so, please send your suggestion to the Folklife Reference Team at the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center, via email to [email protected] or via our Ask A Librarian service.

National Collections

National Humanities Center Covid-19 Oral History Project
The National Humanities Center launched its COVID-19 Oral History Project in 2021 to capture and preserve experiences of a unique time in our medical and social history. The project is dedicated to representing the diverse perspectives of those who have been directly involved in pandemic response efforts in hospitals and clinics but whose stories have gone untold. To accomplish this goal, we have partnered with institutions and individuals across the country to train student interviewers to ethically and responsibly collect oral histories. This is the first step in a larger initiative to use personal narratives to catalyze conversations at the local and national levels and influence positive structural change in healthcare.
Pandemic Oral History Project
To document the cascade of public health, social, and financial crises set in motion by COVID-19, the Archives of American Art created an oral history series that recorded responses to the global pandemic across the American art world. Conducted virtually, the Pandemic Oral History Project features eighty-five short-form interviews with a diverse group of artists, teachers, curators, and administrators. Averaging twenty-five minutes long, each interview provides a firsthand account of and urgent insights into the narrator's triumphs and tragedies in the summer of 2020. With more than thirty hours of recorded video and audio, the series bears witness to an unprecedented era as it unfolded in real time.
A Journal of the Plague Year: COVID-19 Oral History Project
The COVID-19 Oral History Project is a rapid response oral history project focused on archiving the lived experience of the COVID-19 epidemic. The organizers, at Arizona State University, designed this project so that professional researchers and the broader public can create and upload their oral histories online. All the data that participants collect and produce will be open access, open source, and shared with researchers and the public through the IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) Library and the Covid-19 Archive.
OneWorld COVID-19 Oral Histories
The Museum of Chinese in America launched the OneWorld COVID-19 Special Collection to document and share the stories of Chinese Americans and the Chinese diaspora resisting coronavirus-fueled hate with compassion and generosity. This collection will not only feature stories of community efforts but also highlight experiences of individuals and families during these unprecedented times.
International Internet Preservation Consortium: Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Web Archive
Archived since February 2020, this collection was created by the Content Development Group of the International Internet Preservation Consortium in collaboration with Archive-It to preserve web content related to COVID-19. Identification of seed websites and initial web crawling began in February 2020, and the collection will continue to add new content as needed. High priority subtopics include: coronavirus origins; information about the spread of infection; regional or local containment efforts, including vaccine development and implementation of vaccinations; medical and scientific aspects; social aspects; economic aspects; and political aspects. Websites from anywhere in the world and in any language are in scope.
Musicians in America during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Documentary Project of the Society for Ethnomusicology
In March 2020 concert halls, nightclubs, schools, places of worship, and other music settings across the United States turned silent, due to social distancing directives implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in a century, Americans experienced what it is like to live in a society largely devoid of music-making in public space. What were the consequences of this sudden transformation for musicians and their communities? The Society for Ethnomusicology sought to answer this question by hiring three ethnomusicologists (Dr. Holly Hobbs, Dr. Raquel Paraíso, and Dr. Tamar Sella) to conduct 240 online video interviews during 2020 with musicians in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and 5 U.S. territories.
COVID-19 Street Art Archive
The Urban Art Mapping COVID-19 Street Art database documents street art created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Urban Art Mapping is a multi-disciplinary research team dedicated to documenting and analyzing street art. Artists and writers producing work in the streets – including tags, graffiti, murals, stickers, and other installations on walls, pavement, and signs – are in a unique position to respond quickly and effectively in a moment of crisis. The collections include street art from seventeen US states, the District of Columbia, and over forty countries.

Black COVID Care
This collection celebrates how Black Americans have kept themselves healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The website features a constellation of stories of African Americans working to keep their community safe, accompanied by a sound from artist Boomscat. When you click on multiple stories, you hear multiple sounds associated with each story and, at times, a new, related story of Black COVID care. This site was created by the Black Sound Lab at Dartmouth University, directed by Dr. Alison Martin.
Voces of a Pandemic
This video collection highlights the experiences of Latino community members with the COVID-19 pandemic. The interviews comprise one part of the Voces Oral History Center—the leading Latino oral history archive in the United States.
WhoWeLost.org
Who We Lost collects remembrances of those lost to COVID-19, written by family members, friends, and loved ones. Visitors can browse through hundreds of remembrances, gain inspiration for their own writing, and submit their memories of those lost to COVID-19.
How to End a Pandemic
An initiative of Georgetown University, How to End a Pandemic is an effort to expand public access to knowledge, innovation, and insights from pandemic preparedness and response. Notably the project features an oral history archive featuring interviews with a variety of COVID-19 stakeholders and a podcast with experts in epidemics from the past and present.
For Those We Lost Podcast
“For Those We Lost” is a podcast that highlights stories of people losing loved ones to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Each episode focuses on an individual’s experience of the pandemic and the events that led to their loved one’s passing.
Jewish Theological Seminary – COVID-19 Oral Histories
These oral history interviews were recorded as part of an oral history project with the Council of American Jewish Museums called "Collecting These Times: American Jewish Experiences of the Pandemic." Oral histories were recorded between June 2021 and May 2022 and aimed to document the stories of Jewish individuals and institutions as they lived through the pandemic, social justice protests, and the 2020 election year. Interviews were conducted with rabbis, cantors, doctors, parents, teachers, essential workers, journalists, and JTS administrators, students, and faculty.
Coronavirus Crisis Update
Coronavirus Crisis Update is the podcast series of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Global Health Policy Center (GHPC) focused on the Covid-19 pandemic. In Coronavirus Crisis Update, J. Stephen Morrison, GHPC’s Director, and H. Andrew Schwartz, CSIS Chief Communications Officer, speak to those leading the global response and fighting the pandemic in the United States. These conversations dive deep into how the pandemic is impacting America across economics, national security, foreign policy, and health. The podcast includes interviews with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Elizabeth Cameron, and Mollyann Brodie.

State, Regional, and Local Collections

From the Front Line: Narratives of the COVID-19 Pandemic in New Orleans
Epidemics from yellow fever and cholera to the 1918 flu pandemic have tragically impacted New Orleans over the past 300 years. These periods of crisis have had a profound impact on the economic and emotional well-being of the city and region. As the most significant public health crisis in over a century, the COVID-19 pandemic is no different. As part of its response to this critical episode in our shared story, The Historic New Orleans Collection created From the Front Line: Narratives of the COVID-19 Pandemic in New Orleans. This oral history project started in May 2020 and has gathered audio interviews from nurses, doctors, paramedics, epidemiologists, public officials, morticians, spiritual leaders, business leaders, and artists, with more to come.
Brooklyn COVID-19 Stories
Created by the Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn COVID-19 Stories is a collection of oral histories submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes interviews from a wide variety of Brooklynites about how coronavirus and New York City's shutdown has impacted their lives.
Black Carolinians Speak: Portraits of a Pandemic
Black Carolinians Speak: Portraits of a Pandemic is an oral history project organized by the WeGOJA Foundation (formerly the South Carolina African American Heritage Foundation), whose mission is to document and promote African American heritage sites in the Palmetto State. Between May 2020 and 2021, researchers collected over 100 stories from Black South Carolinians, with assistance from undergraduate students at Claflin University and South Carolina State University. The work culminated in a 2021 exhibition at the South Carolina Department of History and Archives.
Locked Down: An Oral History of the COVID-19 Pandemic in West Virginia
This project, supported by grants from the West Virginia Humanities Council and the Albert LePage Center for History in the Public Interest, employs the tools of oral history to capture West Virginia’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, an event of worldwide historic importance.
Listening in Place
Organized by Vermont Folklife, Listening in Place is a project to document Vermonters’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project has four parts: 1) a sound archive to document daily experiences; 2) a series of virtual story circles; 3) short, phone interviews with staff at Vermont Folklife; and 4) a documentation project of homemade masks in Vermont.

Community Conversations: New Jersey’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project
Community Conversations: New Jersey’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project is a collaboration between the New Jersey YMCA State Alliance, the New Jersey Department of Health and Healthy NJ 2030. Community Conversations aims to portray COVID’s mostly painful and sometimes hopeful cadences by integrating interviews, focus groups, social media dialogues, creative artworks, journaling, participatory observation, or document analysis.
Our Story (New Hampshire)
Our Story is an online portal for New Hampshire residents to record their experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and to listen to others’ experiences with COVID-19. The website uses a mapping feature, so visitors can search COVID-19 stories by location and had content in multiple languages.
Humanities Heart to Heart (Nevada)
Humanities Heart to Heart is an online collection of series of essays and multimedia presentations created by the Nevada Humanities Council that highlights diverse, personal perspectives from all corners of Nevada, reflecting on life during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project was selected for the 2021 Schwartz Prize from the Federal of State Humanities Councils, awarded to outstanding public humanities programs.
Performing in the Dark (Nevada)
Performing in the Dark is a photojournalism, multi-media exhibition that highlights the sudden disappearance of live entertainment in Las Vegas—known as the “entertainment capital of the world”—during the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 Oral Historias Project (San Antonio, TX)
This oral history project, organized by Dr. Whitney Chappell in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, explores COVID-19’s impact on San Antonio’s Hispanic community. The project's goals are to share lived experiences, amplify local voices, and document this challenging period in San Antonio's shared history. In each of the individual stories, narrators reflect on how COVID affected their health, family, employment, use of technology, community, and other areas of life in English, Spanish, or Spanglish.
A Twenty-First Century Pandemic in Indian Country: The Resilience of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Against COVID-19
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation Oral History Program aims to capture and retain Mvskoke stories, and the tribal knowledge found within these stories, as shared through Mvskoke oral traditions and oral histories. The oral histories gathered for this project provide a critical record of how 21st century Mvskoke people accomplish their acts of resilience and survival against the COVID-19 pandemic that began in early 2020. The forty interviews presented give insight into how the virus has impacted the lives and tribal communities of Mvskoke people, as well as the numerous ways in which the people of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation have responded to the pandemic.

Stories from the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Resource Guide

American Folklife Center: Ask a Librarian

National and Regional Collections

National Collections

State, Regional, and Local Collections

Selections from the Library's Online Collections

Davey, Keith, artist. Keep Your Distance & Prolong Existence. [Seattle], Amplifier, 2020. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Floyd, Jena, artist. Keep Going. [Seattle], Amplifier, 2020. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Nicholson, Mike, artist. Wear a Mask. [Seattle], Amplifier, 2020. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Watts, Cam, artist. Compassion. [Seattle], Amplifier, 2020. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.