Honouring Canada’s COVID-19 experience

COVID-19 presents an opportunity to preserve a rich and diverse historical record — one intended to honour all experiences and voices and in recognition of ongoing systemic inequalities shaping the pandemic.

We want to begin a conversation about priorities for archival preservation, the need for greater equity and justice in our preservation practices, and ways to safeguard the existence of historical records that will allow us in future to bear witness, with fairness and truth and in a spirit of reconciliation, to our society’s response to COVID-19.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

We assess the challenges facing the preservation of records relating to Canada’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We explain the history of archiving institutions in Canada, and why these institutions now face difficulties as they seek to archive the pandemic, especially the experiences of equity-seeking, poor, and racialized Canadians.

We provide a series of recommendations for government, community-based memory groups and institutions, and scholarly researchers, to help them build solutions to these problems.

Read the paper — Remembering is a form of honouring: preserving the COVID-19 archival record by Esyllt W. Jones, Shelley Sweeney, Ian Milligan, Greg Bak, and Jo-Anne McCutcheon