Documenting the Second City’s Lockdown and Beyond

We’re all getting used to the new ‘normal’ and all the ups and downs which living in lockdown brings, whether that’s social distancing or self-isolating, working from home, working on the front line, home-schooling, or finding new ways of filling lots of free time, so how will this period of our lives go down in history? There will of course be official records of the pandemic at an international, national and local level, but how will future generations learn about your experience of living through the pandemic in Birmingham?

As the city’s archive service, Birmingham Archives & Collections collects and cares for records of individuals, families, communities, businesses and organisations within Birmingham city boundaries so that they can be used by future generations. These archives are used by historians, academics, teachers, students, family historians and many others to understand what life was like in the past.

From our experience of working with historic records, it’s often archives recording personal experiences, such as the letters we wrote about in last week’s VE day blog post, which bring to life the voices and experiences of the past, providing us with insights and making history more real to us in the present.

Example of letters in our collections [MS 2326/1/19 Letters of Private Smith]

A very quick keyword search of our online catalogue for the term ‘influenza’ reveals that very few entries come up relating to the 1918-9 Spanish flu pandemic (although you can find out about it via our local newspaper collections and the Council’s Chief Medical Officer reports). In fact, the only relevant entry in the catalogue is one from Blue Coat School [MS 1622/2/4/5] which includes its Medical Officer’s report about the 6 week closure of the school because of the pandemic. Sounds familiar!

To avoid a similar dearth of records relating to the current times, here’s how you can help us! If some of you have already done this, great, but if not, we’d like you to create or collect material relating to your experience of the Covid-19 pandemic in Birmingham for us to preserve for future generations.

Example of a journal from our collections  [Journal of Thomas Finigan: Missionary – Birmingham Town Mission 1837 – 1838]

Who can get involved?

Everyone. Whether you’re young or old, a key worker, work in a business or a shop, whether you’re at school, at university, retired, or volunteering, your personal experience of the current time is unique and will help historians and researchers of the future build a wider picture of what it was like living in Birmingham during the pandemic of 2020.

How can I contribute?

You can:

• Keep a diary or journal about your personal experience. This can be in writing or audio (but no video please) and could be about a particular day, several days, several weeks or longer.
• Start a scrapbook which could include things like photos, newspaper cuttings, leaflets, flyers, notes, messages or cards from family and friends, etc.
• Write a short story, poem or song.
• Do some oral history interviews of your family or the people you live with about their experiences (audio recordings only please).
• Take photographs showing the impact of the pandemic in your local area in Birmingham.
• Collect leaflets, flyers and posters created by Birmingham’s schools, businesses, voluntary or community organisations and the city council relating to subjects such as social distancing, supporting the vulnerable, closures, new ways of working etc.

It goes without saying, if you do any of the above, please make sure you follow the government’s guidelines on social distancing and stay safe.

Example of a scrapbook in our collections [SF/3/4/1 Bull Street Friends I have known p.42]

How do I give you the material I’ve created or collected?

Keep hold of any material you’d like us to have until Archives & Collections is open to the public again. You can see if we’re open by checking the Library of Birmingham website. Once we’re open, please get in touch by emailing archives.heritage@birmingham.gov.uk and we’ll get back to you.

In our reply we’ll ask you to complete some details about what the material is and its context so that we can assess whether the material fits in with our collections policy which you can find here. Don’t worry, this is standard procedure for all archive material which comes to us. Once we’ve got this information, we’ll then confirm that we’d like your material and advise on how to transfer it to us.

Please don’t post or email any material without prior arrangement with us as we’re all working from home at the moment and when we get back to work we expect we’ll be very busy catching up on jobs we haven’t been able to do from home, as well as getting used to new ways of working.

Archive material can be in digital format

Is there anything else I need to know before I start?

• If you’re using a digital format, please save your material in one of these file formats: Microsoft Word (.docx or .doc), Microsoft Excel (.xlsx or .xls), TIFF (.tiff), JPEG (.jpeg), PDF (.pdf), .wav and .mp3.
• If you take photos of people, respect their privacy and get their permission first or make sure they can’t be identified in the photos. Let them know photos will be passed to us and made accessible to the wider public.
• If you do oral history interviews, get the interviewees’ permission to make an audio recording and let them know they will be passed to us and made accessible to the wider public.
• Please don’t collect objects, create artworks or make videos. These don’t come under our remit so we can’t take these.
• You can find guidance from our conservator on using materials which are less likely to deteriorate quickly and on how to store your material until it can come to us.
• We’re asking that any material you transfer to us is donated. This means that ownership is transferred to us. We’re also asking that copyright be transferred to us too. This is because we want all material collected as part of the Covid-19 archive to be treated equally.
• Material you donate to us will be listed on our catalogue and made available to anyone to view in our searchroom, the Wolfson Centre. Please note that adding material to the catalogue can be a lengthy process so please bear with us.
• Members of the public using the searchroom may take photographs of the material for personal research purposes and Archives & Collections may use the material online and for exhibition and outreach purposes. See below for exceptions.
• If any material contains sensitive information about a living individual, we won’t allow access to the material for 80 years if the individual is an adult or 100 years if the individual is a child, in compliance with the Data Protection Act 2018.

Please spread the word if you know people who may be interested in documenting their experiences.

We look forward to seeing what you create or collect!