Join Us
Join the Project as Curator
We welcome your involvement as a contributor, an individual curator, an institutional partner, or social media promoter.
We also welcome new team members as curators--these are the people that make the project run through their volunteer labor and leadership. Curatorial work happens in a variety of ways, with a range of time commitments. At one end of the spectrum, we have faculty and community organizations calling for materials, whether in the context of courses or events. At the other end of the spectrum, we have curators who are actively maintaining the organizational structure of the archive, as well as collecting. We also have a group of graduate student fellows that reviews every object sumitted to the archive to build context for objects; their work enhances our ability to create meaning and make connections across the archive's collections.
Our leadership team represents a wide variety of individuals who are shaping the project thru their vision. Reflecting that shared authority, both project metadata and project organization allow us to honor collecting events and collecting nodes, whether they're courses or library gatherings. Likewise, we recognize the value of collecting locally (but thinking globally) by creating collections within the archive. Much of the work of our curators will find its way into readily identifiable institution-based metadata or collections. Some of the more intense efforts will become project websites within the archive, such as the Oral History Project or the Australia Collecting effort.
If you're a museum or library, we invite you to collect with us. We can add digital objects related to physical items you're collecting or collect virtual objects together. Through synergistic collecting, we can create metadata that leads from the Journal of a Plague Year back to your home institution or collection. Linking our data in this way exposes the benefits of aggregation with other materials in the Covid-19 Archive, drives people from the Journal of a Plague Year to your institutional repository, creates redundancy, and capitalizes on the power of collecting locally.
If you're a non-governmental organization or community group, think about asking your communities to share their story with the archive; if those communities identify your organization when making submissions, we can build that relation into the metadata, revealing the contours of how various local communities have confronted the pandemic.
If you're an individual interested in sharing your ongoing personal story, use the Journal of a Plague Year as your personal diary for sharing stories, photographs, or audio.
If your a K-12 teacher or University instructor have your students explore the archive and build contributions collectively. The stories that your students share can address silences in the archive and/or explore the ways that geographically and demographically diverse groups are experiencing the pandemic. Also, the archive becomes a way for them to think more self-consciously about their place in society--building civic and community identity--as well as about the ways that individuals create history by documenting their lives. Simply let us know how you're using the archive, have your students tag their posts with your school name and course number, and share your assignment. Our curators will do the rest to help make meaning.
Finally, we have a modest curatorial team of graduate students and interns who regularly review contributions, assign metadata, and make them public. We welcome individuals to join our curators but require that they undergo training, participate in our community (including our slack communication channels), and commit to working at a high level of detail. Please note that graduate students need a sponsor from our team to oversee their work. Anyone serving as an intern--whether at the faculty or undergraduate level--needs to have a faculty supervisor at their home institution involved in monitoring their work. Undergraduate students need a faculty sponsor from their home institution who is willing to join the project to monitor their students' work.
Our partnership model emphasizes shared authority and shared responsibility. For those who seek more recognition for their collecting efforts, we'll expect a higher level of inputs (in the form of their own labor, funding, or some other cost and labor sharing.) For those who want to participate by sharing stories and spreading the word, we offer a platform for doing that and our commitment to recognizing that sharing through excellent metadata that points back to you and your community of collectors.
We always welcome your input and suggestions. Thank you so much for your support.
For further information about the project and to find out how you can participate, contact Professor Mark Tebeau, or one of our curators.