Documenting COVID-19 in Missoula County

About the Program

Category: Arts, Culture and Historic Preservation

Year: 2023

The Missoula County COVID-19 Documentation Project (MCCDP) is a project designed to document the Missoula County community’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our project seeks to document how people understood the pandemic, how they responded to it, and how the decisions they and others made shaped the experience of the pandemic in Missoula County. A central aim of the project is to collect documents and oral histories that can be used to inform responses to future pandemics (and other crises), and to develop better methods for historical documentation in a time of crisis. The project has successfully set up an online archive and publicly accessible portal using the Preservica platform. We conducted twenty oral history interviews and have collected (to date) seven sets of documents from local organizations. These have been archived in the Preservica platform. We also contacted another 48 organizations about donating collections. Those organizations and others may contribute to the archive in the future. Along the way, we have engaged the project through social media, public websites, and state and local newspaper coverage.