Columbus-Lowndes Public Library wants people to donate artifacts that document experience during COVID-19 pandemic

COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – After living through history, the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System is starting to collect artifacts that document the pandemic experience in Lowndes County.

“Never in my wildest dreams as an archivist did I envision living through a pandemic and having to document it,” says the library’s archivist Mona Vance-Ali. “But I mean, this is what we do. This is what we’re here for.”

Vance-Ali faces the monumental task of documenting one of the most significant events of her lifetime.

As events trend back towards normal, the library put out a call to the public on social media, asking for donations of items that show how the pandemic affected their lives.

“We’re just really hoping to be able to collect things so that future generations will look back and research what we lived through,” Vance-Ali says. “Kind of almost like the 1918 Pandemic.”

The library is looking for items like diaries, photos, videos, drawings, masks, even first-hand accounts. All the information will go into the library’s vault, which contains documents that date back 200 years, something extremely rare for Mississippi.

“You can always have that juxtaposition between what people experienced in the moment and then kind of thinking back in 20 years, what do they remember,” Vance-Ali said.

The jump in technology and the widespread use of video to interact with loved ones during quarantine means there is more information available than ever before.

“One of the things that we want to document is how did technology make living through a pandemic different than in previous areas,” Vance-Ali explained.

The comprehensive database can also be used to track the ripple effects of the pandemic far into the future.

“It’s really going to be interesting to see how society is affected by what COVID-19 brought us,” Vance-Ali says.

As a dedicated historian, Vance-Ali says it is both her honor and profound responsibility to document the pandemic.

“I feel like I’m contributing to something that has a much bigger purpose than myself,” she says. “And it’s going to help the community and help generations in the future understand what we all lived through.”

Click here to find out how to make a donation to the library.