“Pandemic Diaries,” opens at The New York Public Library, a Collection of Oral Histories Documenting Life Under Lockdown

Photo by Andy on Unsplash

Collected in real time by The Library, the audio collection captures the unprecedented lived experiences of New Yorkers and others during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The New York Public Library announced today that the Pandemic Diaries collection, an audio archive chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic crowdsourced by the Library, is now publicly available. Collected between August 2020 and July 2021, the collection consists of nearly 270 recorded stories, making it the largest COVID audio collecting project undertaken in New York City during that period.  

“The Pandemic Diaries collection provides a direct window into the lives of New Yorkers at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, offering insights into our city’s resilience while also capturing the profound loneliness and loss caused by the disease,” said Brent Reidy, Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries. “By preserving these raw, personal accounts, we ensure that the lessons of this devastating time are never lost, but instead serve as a cornerstone for our collective understanding of history.”  

“To live through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was to experience history in real time,” said Julie Golia, the Linda May Uris Director of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library. “As one of the world’s preeminent institutions committed to preserving the history of New York and beyond, the Library recognized how important it was to document this extraordinary time in history through the voices of those who experienced it.”     

Contributors recall with poignant immediacy the unprecedented challenges of the first pandemic year: stay-at-home-orders, online learning, parenting under lockdown, remote work, death and grieving in isolation, nationwide protests for racial justice, and the many ways that New Yorkers found hope and resilience in community. Amid the diaristic entries, which average thirty minutes in length, are spoken word poems, essays, interviews, and mentions of national and local politics and news. The resulting archive of first-person testimonies helps ground this sweeping historic period in everyday human moments. 

In addition to collecting crowdsourced audio submissions, the Pandemic Diaries project also worked with individuals, educators, and organizations such as The Strangers, a community of Muslim poets; the CUNY Mexican Studies Institute; and other educators who integrated the project into their online teaching.

The collection is open to anyone with a NYPL library card. It can be accessed in-person at the Library’s flagship Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. 

The collection joins other significant oral histories at The New York Public Library including the Rikers Public Memory Project, the MTA 1982 and 1987 Capital Programs oral histories, and the Henry Street Settlement Hope & Resilience on the COVID Frontlines oral histories.