Preserving a Pandemic with Zoom: The National Nordic Museum’s COVID-19 Oral History Project

• Published in: Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals
• Main Authors: Anderson, Leslie Anne, DeRiemer, Alison C.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2020
• Subjects: Norway; Pacific; Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1550190620980837; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1550190620980837; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1177/1550190620980837

In April 2020, the National Nordic Museum (NNM) in Seattle launched an oral history initiative titled “A Pandemic Preserved: The COVID-19 Crisis in the Nordic Countries and the Pacific Northwest.” Utilizing the video conferencing platform Zoom, the NNM has collected the stories of individuals impacted by the coronavirus in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Washington state, the first reported epicenter in the United States. Augmenting an existing collection of more than 900 oral history interviews, “A Pandemic Preserved” privileges current perspectives of ongoing events over retrospection. With the consent of the participants, the recordings are made accessible to researchers through the Museum’s collection management system (CMS), as well as promoted periodically to a general audience through social media channels to foster online engagement during closure. This article will examine the project’s scope, execution, products, dissemination to academic and general audiences, and relation to the NNM’s existing oral history collection. It will also consider how a project that captures response to a global health crisis realizes the Museum’s collecting goals in comparative and area studies.