Sonoma County Library to collect writings, photos of residents’ experience with pandemic

How has the pandemic changed you, your neighborhood, Sonoma County Library wants to know.|

The coronavirus and the path it is leaving behind altered life as we knew it, and the Sonoma County Library wants to capture the experiences of residents and create a special library collection.

“This could be a collection for researchers or community members to use in the future,” said Sarah Vantrease, division manager of public services for Sonoma County Library.

Residents are encouraged to share and donate their history of COVID-19 and the shelter-in-place through writing, art or other two-dimensional physical documents that will become a part of a special collection for future generations. For storage and preservation purposes the library is asking that items be no larger than 11 inches by 17 inches and can be stored flat, or something that can be stored digitally.

“Researchers and students will be able to use your work to understand what it was like living in Sonoma County during this challenging time,” said Connie Williams, History Room librarian at the Petaluma Regional Library in a press release. “Your story can be a part of our community’s story.”

Vantrease said that Williams came up with the idea before the shelter-in-place order took effect. They were trying to come up with ways to help people stay engaged with the library even if the library was closed or had reduced services.

Williams “is embedded in the educational community in Petaluma,” Vantrease said, so what she developed was “almost an assignment, a very planned way to tell people ahead of time, ‘we’d like to collect this.’”

Merith Weisman, director of community engagement and strategic initiatives at Sonoma State Univeristy contacted the library to discuss partnering in this iniative.

“Merith said they were anticipating a lot of their instructors and professors would be assigning things like this as well,” Vantrease said, meaning that there could be an “even wider documentation of this event.”

Students might be focused on health care, for example, and gather not just an individual’s perspective or observations, but maybe document an interview they had with a health care worker, or maybe they might write a science review or a white paper.

Through scrapbooks, drawing, letters, journals, paintings, photos and any other creative media, residents are encouraged to express how they feel, document what has changed for them at school or work, in their homes and neighborhoods.

Collecting the material will take place after it is deemed safe to bring them to libraries. Libraries are not able to take back their own material yet due to the pandemic and safety measures, Vantrease said.

“We’re not trying to be exhaustive,” she said, adding that they know there are other groups in the community such as the Museum of Sonoma County that are collecting other items.

When Williams and Vantrease first started talking about the project – which has the tentative name “Sonoma Responds” – they wanted to get the word out “right away” because it was March and they thought things would be back to normal by May 1.

“This has gone on much longer than expected,” Vantrease said.

People are all experiencing this differently, she said. For example, one woman she talked to is tracking data on a daily basis in a spreadsheet. “It’s how she copes,” Vantrease said. Another woman and her daughter go on daily walks and take photos of the things they observe, things that surprise them.

They are still working on the framework of how they will accept items, but they hope people will work on their personal ways of documenting this experience, she said.

For more information, contact publicservices@sonomalibrary.org

Conact Anne at anne.ernst@sonomanews.com.

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