MACON, Ga. — There's no doubt that 2020 will go down in history and future generations will study how the world coped with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Middle Georgia Regional Library is creating a pandemic archive.
The Middle Georgia Archives are located at the Washington Library in Macon.
Now, historians down the road can learn from your donations relating to the pandemic.
Sarah Schaaf says dealing with COVID-19 and raising kids isn't easy.
"With our pandemic experience, it has been hard finding toilet paper finding Clorox wipes," she said.
Schaaf has four little girls at home and she says she is sanitizing constantly.
"Seven, four, three, and two," she said as she rolled through their ages.
She snapped pictures of empty shelves and says she's willing to donate to the library's pandemic archive.
That's good news for Murial Jackson, who is an archivist at the Middle Georgia Regional Library.
"It's kind of a unique time for us because the last time anyone would have sheltered in place would have been the Spanish flu," Jackson said.
Jackson works with fragile history everyday.
"We had one picture from the Spanish flu that showed the students and teachers at Ballard School," she said. "We even read about the Macon Red Cross that made 15,000 face masks because they had to make them for Camp Wheeler the soldiers."
Stored in the archives, they also have a picture of a caned of water from when Budweiser shifted their business during the flood of 1994.
Over two decades later, the library can record and compile audio, video, pictures, t-shirts, and journal entries.
"Our current is someone else's history 10 or 15 years from now, and we need to show how people reacted and how activities were going on and we need to understand what people had to make and how they came together," Jackson said.
As for Schaaf, she thought of a few things she'd like recorded about this time.
"Lots of people wearing masks, children wearing masks and even signs of the signs posted up. You know, you drive down the interstate it's a pandemic warning to take care of the elderly," Schaaf said.
It will all be there for her daughters to study and maybe get a better understanding of how we all lived during COVID-19.
The library is not open and can not take in-person donations just yet.
But they do have a way for folks to get the donation process started.
Go to bibblib.org and click on the pandemic archive tab.
From there, fill out a form and the library folks will get in touch with you.
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