Archiving NAU’s COVID-19 response

April 22, 2020 by special collections & archives

While Lumberjacks near and far, past and present, struggle with the changes to their lives caused by the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), Special Collections & Archives (SCA) staff are focused on ensuring that future generations of scholars can access a historical record of these strange and difficult times to better understand the pandemic’s impact on the NAU community, on campus, on the Colorado Plateau, and beyond.

"Scholar Guy" statue (Untitled 1996: Year of Science by Péter Párkányi) in a face mask. Cline Library, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona. — *“Scholar Guy” statue (Untitled 1996: Year of Science by Péter Párkányi) in a face mask. Cline Library, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona. April 22, 2020. Photo by Peter Runge.*

Like many other libraries and archives across the country, SCA is currently working to preserve snapshots of NAU’s response to the coronavirus pandemic by capturing born-digital content like websites, emails, blog posts, and other publicly available material produced by the university which reflects the university’s actions and communications.

The goal of the project is to collect a body of otherwise ephemeral, web-based materials that will help future researchers understand NAU’s COVID-19 response in context. Some of these items may eventually be added to University Archives as historic records documenting the university.

Beginning in mid-March 2020, the Archivist for Digital Programs, Kelly Phillips, began using SiteSucker to regularly download local copies of two NAU websites, as well as the Arizona Board of Regents, City of Flagstaff, and Coconino County’s COVID-19 response pages:

https://nau.edu/coronavirus
https://nau.edu/library/covid-19/
https://www.azregents.edu/news/novel-coronavirus
https://flagstaff.az.gov/4299/COVID-19
https://www.coconino.az.gov/covid19

SCA staff are also using the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine to periodically capture NAU’s official COVID-19 webpage (https://nau.edu.coronavirus) as the content on that site is updated over time.

A screenshot of the Internet Archive captures of the official NAU coronavirus webpage between March and April 2020. — *A screenshot of the Internet Archive captures of the official NAU coronavirus webpage, https://nau.edu/coronavirus, between March and April 2020.*

While SCA is currently unable to accept physical donations of material, those who are interested in contributing digital content which documents the NAU community’s experiences with COVID-19, such as digital photographs, videos, documents, etc. are encouraged to contact the department at SCA.CollectionsManagement@nau.edu to learn more.