Documenting the Pandemic

How do you document a pandemic? How do you determine what will be of interest to researchers 50 or 100 years from now when so many things are so different than they were six months ago? Deciding what records should be kept and preserved in the archives is one of an archivist’s biggest challenges during normal times. The scope of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the speed at which information appears and changes, made that task exponentially more difficult.

To help us hone in on what to collect, we looked to the mission of the State Archives at the Library of Virginia, which is to document the actions of Virginia state government. Specifically, when making our collecting decisions, we focused on the actions that agencies took in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the way in which they communicated with the public via their websites.

Fortunately, the Library already archives state agency websites using Archive-It, a subscription service provided by the Internet Archive. Archive-It allows us to capture, preserve, and make websites available to researchers. Since 2005, the Library has regularly archived the websites of the governor and his cabinet, lieutenant governor, attorney general, state agencies, and members of Virginia’s congressional delegation and General Assembly. In addition to these sites, we identified more than 80 others explicitly documenting state agency responses to COVID-19. Several websites were “crawled” (captured and preserved) daily—including the Virginia Department of Health, Virginia Department of Emergency Management, Virginia Department of Corrections, and the Office of the Governor—others monthly. Using the Library’s archived web collections, researchers can view Virginia’s actions and guidance in response to the health, safety, and financial disruption caused by the pandemic as it unfolded in real time.

In response to the pandemic, we added one significant subject not captured by the Library’s regularly scheduled website crawls: education. On March 23, 2020, Governor Ralph Northam issued Executive Order 53 that ended all in-person instruction at K–12 schools. With schools closed for the remainder of the academic year, each school division had to determine how learning would continue. The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) issued guidance to help school divisions execute plans to continue instruction. While the Library’s web-collecting focus is on state government, the unprecedented closure of schools warranted an exception.

In order to capture the implementation of the VDOE’s guidance, we created a new web archive collection called COVID-19: Virginia’s Public Schools and Higher Education Collection. This collection archived each school division’s website as well as any COVID-19–specific sites. The collection’s 535 websites revealed the digital divide, the need for rural broadband, the importance of schools in providing food security, and the variety of digital platforms used across the commonwealth for online learning. Additional crawls captured each school division’s instructional plans for opening during the 2020–2021 school year. Also included in this collection are COVID-19–specific websites for Virginia’s public institutions of higher education.

Researchers can access the COVID-19: Virginia’s Public Schools and Higher Education Collection, the Governor Ralph Northam Administration Web Archive, 2018–2022, and the Library’s other archival web collections on our Archive-It home page.

Roger Christman, Senior State Records Archivist.
Mike Strom, former State Archivist and Director of the Library’s Government Records Services.