The New York Public Library is developing and executing a visionary strategy for digitization, digital preservation, and access. The Library stewards rapidly growing collections of digitized and born-digital collection items, and it works to make these collections easier to discover, sample, use, and reuse in more creative ways.
Learn about the Pandemic Diaries below.
Explore our other current and previous projects and learn about our Digital Research Strategy for 2021–2024.
Pandemic Diaries
Status: Active
Launched: 2020
As the COVID-19 pandemic transformed lives across the city, nation, and world, The New York Public Library sought to document this pivotal moment in our history. The Pandemic Diaries project invited you to submit, via an online form, audio recordings of yourself or your loved ones telling personal stories about life amid the pandemic.
The New York Public Library is committed to preserving and making accessible the stories that shape our history so that people today, along with future generations, can better understand our world and each other. The audio diaries we collected will document the experiences of people from all walks of life, in their own words. These diaries will be archived in NYPL’s research libraries—the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts—to be preserved and made available to the public, scholars, journalists, and students for decades to come.
As of July 9, 2021, the Pandemic Diaries project is no longer collecting submissions. Over the next several months, the Library will review, preserve, and process each submission. When that is complete, the Pandemic Diaries collection will be made accessible to the public. To learn more about the project, click here.