Queens Memory COVID-19 Project
On March 16, 2021, Queens Public Library (QPL) closed its physical locations as part of the citywide lockdown. New York’s COVID numbers were growing exponentially, and our borough of Queens became the epicenter of the epicenter of the global pandemic. In coordination with the New York City Mayor’s Office, to help slow the spread of COVID-19 and protect the health and safety of our staff and the public we serve, all QPL locations were closed on March 16 and would not reopen until the following summer for limited service. All QPL in-person programs were suspended, including those organized by Queens Memory Project, and all QPL staff members shifted to remote work.
The team behind the Queens Memory Project, a community-led archiving program co-administered by QPL and Queens College CUNY, shifted practices to be fully remote and focused on what was happening right outside our doors.
On April 9, Queens Memory, together with our partner Urban Archive, launched the COVID-19 Project to help our neighbors and ourselves process our experiences of the pandemic, collectively and individually, and to capture a lasting record of how Queens residents were living, working, learning, and helping one another during an unprecedented time.
Alongside our collecting, archiving and oral history recording efforts, we created several series of virtual programs that highlighted contributions to the archive, created new uses for the oral history interviews we were recording with community members and provided ways for the public to connect at a distance.
This project was borough-wide and open to participation by those living outside of the area due to our implementation of remote interviewing protocols. All photographs, videos, interviews and other materials donated to the collections pertain to the lives and experiences of those who live, work, and/or go to school in Queens.
To reach the Queens public, we created the @queensmemory Instagram account and shared our inaugural post on the same day as our COVID-19 Project launch. Social media, particularly Instagram and Facebook Live, became integral to our communication and outreach strategy. We used social media to reach new audiences, share public contributions to our archiving effort, and recruit volunteers and invite people to share their stories with Queens Memory.
With the help of QPL’s Communications department, the COVID-19 Project was highlighted by local media within days of its launch, with stories appearing on NY1, Univision, and WNYC. On May 7, Governor Andrew Cuomo included the COVID-19 Project in his statewide daily e-mail update, noting that “The Queens Public Library is documenting stories of New York City residents during Coronavirus. Through the Queens Memory COVID-19 Project, the library aims to create a historical record of how New Yorkers are experiencing this pandemic.”
https://news.hamlethub.com/carmel-new-york/4190-cuomo-s-daily-e-mail-update-for-may-7-2020
The shift to remote programming enabled Queens Memory to reach new audiences through live events and streaming recorded programs, including edited interviews recorded by QPL general librarian Jo-Ann Wong with local business owners that were released as part of the “What Shapes Our Communities” series on Facebook Live, “International Open Mic” organized by EunWoo Nam and Diana Munoz that brought together participants around the globe to share the songs that were helping them get through lockdown, and a new workshop series to introduce Queens Memory’s approach to oral history to interested volunteers and prepare them to conduct remote interviews for the archive.
Archiving, Oral History, Workshops, Digitization, Exhibition, Other
Crowdsourcing: The public was invited to share their first-hand stories about their pandemic experiences in any digital format, which were accepted through a toll-free phone number that linked to a voicemail box and AirTable forms for QPL’s Digital Archives team to process and archive. Submissions included video diaries, scans of original artworks, photographs, voicemail messages, and text pieces.
Mapping: Urban Archive created an online project map that was regularly updated to reflect the locations of participants’ stories. Visitors to https://queenslib.org/covid were able to “visit” places in their neighborhoods and beyond by interacting with people’s stories.
Oral History: The pandemic led to major shifts in Queens Memory’s approaches to oral history. In response to overwhelming public interest, we began to host weekly virtual training sessions to introduce new volunteers to oral history interviewing and facilitated matching and outreach between interested interviewers and interviewees. Prior to this time, Queens Memory interviews had been recorded exclusively in person; during the pandemic, we shifted to an entirely remote approach utilizing phone recording and video conferencing platforms (Streamyard, Webex, Google Voice, and Zoom) and created new guides to oral history interviews for interviewers and interviewees.
Podcasting: With the support of a grant from the New York Community Trust, Queens Memory was able to hire a team of audio professionals to produce and edit the second season of the Queens Memory Podcast, “The Borough We Became: Queens Residents on Life During COVID-19.” The series was released every week between August and October, and included a weekly public listening party hosted on Facebook Live to bring the podcast team and guests from the week’s episode together. The series was recognized by the 2021 Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition and received the Impact Award for “Intersection,” an episode produced by Sam Riddell.
Public Programming: The COVID-19 Project included a wide range of virtual public programs, from live creative workshops led by local artists to edited compilations that brought together archival submissions around shared themes to panel discussions focusing on issues around immigration, food insecurity, and racial justice.
The COVID-19 Project brought dozens of new volunteers and participants to Queens Memory, helped launch new approaches to public programming and volunteer trainings, and created a collection reflecting diverse experiences of the pandemic in a range of media forms.
Language accessibility was achieved with the help of QPL’s Metadata Services and Marketing departments and volunteer translators. Major outreach materials were available in English, Mandarin, and Spanish, and submission forms were also available in Arabic, Bengali, Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, Russian, and Urdu.
Submissions to the COVID-19 Project were featured and shared in a range of forms, including the Urban Archive map at https://queenslib.org/covid, the Queens Memory Podcast’s second season, the two-part compilation “The COVID-19 Project: Navigating a Pandemic” that aired on QPTV, and as the source material for creative works produced by visual artist Azikiwe Mohammed and playwright Harris Doran.
We consider the COVID-19 Project a major success and milestone in Queens Memory’s history, but we hope we never have to launch another rapid response archiving effort under emergency circumstances. The pandemic created unprecedented circumstances and work conditions that allowed us to work closely and quickly with many colleagues at QPL and Queens College, Urban Archive, project partners, and an active volunteer base.
The team created entirely new workflows to manage the influx of public submissions and oral history interviews, wrote new outreach materials and interview guides to explain our work and oral history, launched new educational workshops to welcome a steady stream of new volunteers, and crafted new communication and outreach strategies to utilize social media to reach people who were often learning about Queens Memory for the first time.
Accessibility is a top priority for our team, and our experiences with the COVID-19 Project revealed some key differences between our pre-pandemic work. We prepared submission and outreach materials in a number of languages, but most of the submissions and interviews were in English. In terms of demographics, many of our participants tended to be younger than our pre-pandemic audience, which skewed older. We also see that certain neighborhoods (particularly western Queens) are better represented in the collection, which also reflects the younger, more digitally connected audiences we were reaching through our outreach efforts and programming offerings.
The project team included Queens Memory staff, Queens Public Library’s Metadata Services, Marketing, Communications, Government Affairs, and Institutional Assessment departments, Queens College CUNY’s Special Collections and Archives, and Urban Archive. In addition, the team was helped by volunteers, undergraduate interns, graduate fellows, project staff, and external consultants. The collaboration between many colleagues and partners involved the creation of entirely new workflows for processing, outreach, publication, and public engagement.
Activity Timeline
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