Our largest collection so far is COVID-19 in Waltham, which makes up a portion of the library’s very first born-digital archival collection. That collection began in April 2020, when the WPL (like most other places) was closed to help “flatten the curve.” A month or two prior, as the pandemic was building steam, I had become fascinated with the 1918 influenza. for the topic had been disappointing, as there wasn’t too much beyond a couple of newspaper clippings, brief mentions in the library trustees’ minutes, and a few pages in the records of the local nurses’ association. I was hoping to put together a better picture of what it was like to live in Waltham during the flu, perhaps to give myself a glimpse of what I could expect in the coming weeks (heh… how naïve I was).
Scrapbook page showing newspaper clippings from the phone number database early days of the 1918 flu. Scrapbook is part of the records of the Waltham Public Library. Photo by D. Hamlin.
I put out a call via the library’s social media for those who lived, worked, and/or went to school in Waltham to share their stories, hoping to build the kind of collection I wanted and failed to find from 1918. There was an initial rush of Google Form submissions, a handful of photos, and one video, and then nothing. I was pleased we had received some materials, but still wanted to paint a broader picture of Waltham under Covid. Enter Community Webs! For the past several months I’ve been working to collect retroactively what I was hoping to capture at the time – news articles, videos, the city website, information from the schools, and so on. While it’s not as comprehensive as it might have been if I’d been able to gather it all as it happened, I’ve been able to save over 500 GB of data that will help those in the future to better imagine what it was like to live in Waltham during Covid.