The staff at Elizabethtown College’s High Library are collecting projects of all sorts from faculty, staff and students regarding their experiences of living in the time of COVID-19.  

“Keep in mind if you have a class that is doing a COVID related project, course assignments can be submitted. There is no deadline whenever people want to submit things – for the time being. We already got [a] documentary film, essays, art work, and [it] will be cool to see what else we get.,” archivist Rachel Grove Rohrbaugh said via Zoom. 

Other colleges and universities are doing similar archives, gathering pieces for future generations to really understand what it was like to live through the pandemic. However, the High Library staff wanted to add a spin to it and decided to focus their archive on personal experience. 

“We wanted to focus more on personal reflections such as the day to day life,” Grove Rohrbaugh said. 

The idea formed when the library staff saw in the spring other campuses doing archives. The staff thought it would be great for Etown to have a collection as well, but more centered around each individual’s personal experience.

Contributing to the COVID-19 Archive can benefit those adding pieces as well. 

“They get the chance to slow down and take the time to get down their thoughts, sharing the projects they [have] done, and they share something that matters to them in this difficult time,” Grove Rohrbaugh said. 

The High Library hopes to do an online display potentially of all the submitted pieces within the next two months.

For the future generations she intends for the archive to “capture material that might help future researchers learn what was going on in the community.” 

“I hope [future students] get a deeper understanding [of] what it meant to be a student or faculty or staff during this time, as well as, be a resource so people can really understand what the time period was all about for Etown,”Grove Rohrbaugh said.