Saving memories: Filipinas Heritage Library calls for submissions to its Philippine COVID Archive
IT IS a human imperative to document their lives, thus people through the centuries have turned to journals and diaries, writing about the momentous and the quotidian. These records offer future readers a window to the past, a way to understand that era. Arguably the most famous is The Diary of Anne Frank, which has for generations given readers a glimpse of life under Nazi Germany through the eyes of an adoloscent girl.
In the 21st century, taking pen to paper journals is considered quaint — most people record their lives through blogs and social media posts, both through words and pictures and videos. It is these records that the Filipinas Heritage Library is looking for to fill a special archive on the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic experience.
The Filipinas Heritage Library is “collating snapshots of our quarantined lives during this pandemic: the way we cope, live, fight, protect, and help ourselves, our communities, and our countrymen in facing this crisis,” it said in a call for contributions.
“Help us collect tangible evidence of the experience and memory of the Filipino that will later provide a different perspective to any research that will come out of this pandemic era for the generations to come,” it said.
Among the items it is looking for to include in the Philippine Covid Archive are photos, videos, audio, written documents, and website links about the Philippine pandemic experience.
The contributions will become part of the Library’s collection and will be made accessible to researchers of Philippine history and culture.
Selected contributions will also be posted on the Library’s Instagram page, and can become a part of “A Journal of the Plague Year: an Archive of CoVid19,” a collaboration of international curators on an global pandemic archive: https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive/page/welcome.
To learn more about this project or submit contributions, go to https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdPScdQu8C0hYqNr9804_VUTzZaGapMTo-Yqqs4aeB–_Ar4g/viewform. To learn more about Filipinas Heritage Library, visit https://www.filipinaslibrary.org.ph.
