This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
By Chris Petersen
Title: COVID-19 at Oregon State University Collection, 2020-2023
Predominant Dates: 2020-2021
ID: MSS COVID
Primary Creator: Dvorak, Anna Elizabeth
Extent: 5.39 gigabytes. More info below.
Arrangement: The collection is organized into six series: 1. University Communications, 2020-2022; 2. SCARC COVID-19 Collecting Initiative, 2020-2022; 3. OSU Libraries and Press COVID-19 Outreach, 2020-2021; 4. The Bright Side Project, 2022; 5. The Benton County Quaranzine, 2020; and 6. Archive-It Collection: "COVID-19 at OSU and in Corvallis, Oregon," 2020-2023.
Date Acquired: 00/00/2020
Languages of Materials: English [eng]
The COVID-19 at Oregon State University Collection contains the product of several collecting and outreach initiatives led by the Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC), the Oregon State University Libraries and Press, and other campus and community members.
Series 1 consists, in part, of COVID-related university and library broadcast emails, as collected by Anna Dvorak, Public Services Assistant in SCARC. The university emails were typically released by the OSU President's Office or the Office of the Provost, and authored by Presidents Ed Ray, F. King Alexander or Becky Johnson, as well as Provost Ed Feser and Vice-Provost Dan Larson, who served at the university's Coronavirus Response Coordinator. The library emails were generally written by administrators Faye Chadwell, Anne-Marie Deitering or members of the Library Employee Association. The emails have been compiled into chronologically organized PDF files. Series 1 also includes screenshots of the OSU Today Instagram feed, which focused on employees' experience of remote work. These screenshots have also been compiled into PDFs and arranged chronologically.
Series 2 contains submissions received by SCARC to its Covid Collecting Project, which was also led by Anna Dvorak. Launched in May 2020, the project offered members of the OSU community the opportunity to deposit materials documenting their experience of the pandemic into a dedicated archival collection. Participants contributed born digital materials, as well as accompanying permissions and contextual information, through a web form or direct communication with SCARC staff. The resulting series includes multiple pandemic journals as well as photographs and art works. These materials are available to researchers in the SCARC reading room or upon request; participant permissions and context forms have been moved to the SCARC central files.
Series 3 documents pandemic-era signage and outreach generated by the OSU Libraries and Press. In addition to born digital signage templates created at various points from 2020-2021, the series also holds a PDF virtual tour of the Valley Library building that was developed for patron use during the period of limited reopening in Fall 2020. Likewise included in the series are the products of two outreach activities initiated by the OSU Libraries. The first, Postcards to Campus, offered participants an opportunity for artistic expression while also maintaining a connection to the Corvallis campus during a period of remote work and learning. The series holds born digital creations from this project as well as physical postcards that were mailed to the library and subsequently displayed in the windows of the building's east rotunda. A second outreach activity, Postcards to Public Health Workers, was the result of a collaboration between the OSU Libraries and Press, the OSU Center for Health Innovation, and the OSU Student Public Health Association. It invited participants to express gratitude for public health workers through postcards of encouragement that would be distributed to hospitals and care facilities around Oregon.
Series 4 consists of submissions to The Bright Side Project, which was initiated by Regan Gurung, director of the General Psychology Program at OSU and also Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director of OSU's Center for Teaching and Learning. The Bright Side Project sought out participant reflections on resilience, strength and coping during the pandemic. The series is entirely born digital and includes essays, poems and photographic illustrations.
Series 5 consists of a single print item, The Benton County Quaranzine, which was published by the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library. The 47-page zine consists of poems, essays, drawings, cartoons and other artistic expressions submitted by 21 community members from June 1 to November 2, 2020.
Series 6 documents an external resource, the Covid-19 at OSU and in Corvallis, Oregon Archive-It collection, that was curated by SCARC staff from April 2020 to March 2023. The Archive-It tool is used to preserve websites, which are available for patron use from within the Internet Archive digital library. The collection described in Series 6 includes numerous crawls of OSU's official coronavirus information page as well as the TRACE-OSU website. Also included are crawls related to safety at the Corvallis Farmers' Market, project web pages for activities described elsewhere in this collection, an ArcGIS StoryMaps exhibit curated by an OSU graduate student, and five pandemic-related YouTube videos released by Oregon State University.
The global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus began making a direct impact on Oregon State University in mid-March 2020, when university leaders implemented a social distancing protocol and placed limits on non-essential travel in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus. The following week, many OSU professors chose to deliver their final exams remotely or to cancel them altogether. On March 23 - the first day of OSU's Spring Break - Oregon Governor Kate Brown issued a statewide stay-at-home order that resulted in a formal, mandated transition to remote learning for all OSU students as well as remote work for all OSU employees, save a small number deemed essential to the continuation of on-site campus operations. All spring sports were cancelled and the university implemented a hiring freeze in anticipation of sharply reduced revenues.
In summer 2020, the university announced that about 90% of it courses would be offered remotely, and that limited on-site residential options and campus services would be offered to incoming students, with interactions governed by strict masking, testing and social distancing protocols. Throughout much of this time period, as well as the months that followed, OSU's decisions were informed by its innovative TRACE testing program, which collected data from a randomly selected sample of campus and community members to help determine positivity rates in Corvallis initially, and later Bend, Newport and other communities across Oregon.
OSU continued to lean heavily on remote work and learning for the remainder of the 2020-21 academic year. In the meantime, multiple COVID-19 vaccines became available in the early months of 2021, with wider access emerging in the spring of that year. With limited exemptions, OSU required all students and employees to be vaccinated prior to September 15, 2021, in support of a plan to increase on-site teaching and research activities that would be guided by Oregon Health Authority protocols and county risk assessments. Beginning that fall, hybrid classes became common, with some students attending in person and others - including those needing to quarantine after having tested positive - participating via Zoom. On December 28, 2021, the university announced that all non-exempt students and employees would also be required to receive COVID-19 vaccine boosters by February 15, 2022.
Throughout the first half of 2022, on-site activities increased in number and, at the end of the 2021-22 academic year, OSU hosted an in-person commencement for the first time in three years. Though voluntary masking, remote work and hybrid class options remained a component of university culture, by fall 2022 activities on the OSU campus had largely come to resemble those that preceded the global pandemic.
More Extent Information: 636 files born digital; 0.3 cubic feet
Statement on Access: Collection is open for research.
Acquisition Note: Collection materials were transferred to SCARC from numerous donors between 2020-2023.
Related Materials:
Four group oral history interviews with OSU undergraduate students reflecting on their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic are held in the Voices of Oregon State University Oral History Collection (OH 009). An interviewing project with members of the OSU athletics community that was prompted by the pandemic has been described as the Josh Worden Interviews on Oregon State University Athletics (MSS Worden).
Reflections on the broad impact of the pandemic on community college education across the state can be found in the Oregon Higher Education Oral Histories Collection (OH 046). Finally, additional documentation of university life in 2020 and 2021 can be found in the Historical Publications of Oregon State University digital collection.
Preferred Citation: COVID-19 at Oregon State University Collection (MSS COVID), Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon.
Dvorak, Anna Elizabeth
Corvallis-Benton County Public Library
Gurung, Regan A. R.
Oregon State University. Libraries
Oregon State University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives Research Center
Academic libraries--Administration.
Academic libraries--Oregon.
COVID-19 (Disease)
COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-
Epidemics--Social aspects.
Oregon State University--Administration.
Public health.
Quarantine.
Universities and colleges--Oregon--Corvallis--Administration.
University History
Born digital.
electronic mail
personal narratives
Postcards.
social media
Web sites
Zines
Series 1 consists in part of emails broadcast either university- or library-wide, and providing updates and guidance on operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The university communications were usually authored by the President's Office or the Office of the Provost, with numerous messages written by Dan Larson, OSU's Vice-Provost for Student Affairs and designated Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Library operations messaging was typically authored by University Librarian Faye Chadwell or Associate University Librarian (later Dean of Libraries) Anne-Marie Deitering. Messages circulated by the Library Employee Association that highlighted the remote working environments for individual faculty or staff are also included.
The remainder of the series is comprised of compiled screenshots of the OSU Today Instagram feed, which also featured the remote working environments for employees across the university.
Submissions to weekly "Quarantine Challenges" issued to members of the Ocean 11 marine club at OSU, as led by Cynthia Leonard, academic advisor for the OSU Marine Studies Initiative. The challenges were designed to get club members out of their homes and into nature, with submissions consisting of photographs, videos or drawings documenting individuals' outings. The themes were as follows: 1. Bunches of Birds; 2. Pet Paparazzi; 3. Focus on Flora; 4. The Sky's the Limit; 5. Fun Fungi; 6. Feeding Frenzy; 7. Growing Gardens; 8. Go Wild.
Student participants included: Laurel Brinson-Larrabee, Landon Bunting, Russell Campbell, Jensen Davis, Ian Hofbeck, Nadia Leal, Delaney McGee, Hayleigh Middleton, Kelleigh Petersdorf, Seth Staten, Elizabeth Wirsching and Daisy Youmans.
Series 3 documents various forms of outreach extended by the OSU Libraries and Press during the COVID-19 pandemic. Included are digital surrogates of COVID-related signage that was posted throughout the Valley Library, as well as a virtual tour of library spaces that was created to guide use of the building during the period of limited reopening in Fall 2020.
The series also holds submissions to two initiatives centering on postcards. The Postcards to Campus project offered participants an opportunity to submit either physical or digital postcards in the spirit of artistic expression and maintaining a connection to the OSU campus during the period of remote learning. The Postcards to Public Health Workers served as a mechanism for participants to express gratitude to public health employees statewide.
The Benton County Quaranzine was compiled by the staff of the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library and consists of submissions from area residents collected from June 1 to November 2, 2020, focusing on life during the pandemic and the era's political unrest. The resulting print publication includes drawings, cartoons, collages, photographs and other artistic renderings, as well as essays and poems.
Contributors to the project were: Quinn Andreas, Ellen Beier, Jack Compere, Molly Curry, Tru Denton, Sarah Finkle, David Grube, Mari Beth Hackett, Forrest Johnson, Charlie Kelso, Colleen Kitchen, Erin MacAdams, Nancy Chestnut Matsumoto, Orion Olson, John Otto, Vic Russell, Linda Varsell Smith, Karen Stephenson, Kim Thackray, Marvel Vigil and Marion J. Whitney.
From April 2020 to March 2023, SCARC staff used the Archive-It web archiving tool to collect websites of interest as they evolved throughout the pandemic. This collection of preserved websites is available through the "Covid-19 at Oregon State University and in Corvallis, Oregon" Archive-It landing page, which is a product of the Internet Archive.
The most frequently crawled websites were OSU's official Covid-19 Information page (387 crawls) and the OSU TRACE voluntary testing program website (279 crawls).
Other collected websites included OSU Today; the OSU Libraries Virtual Reading Room; the OSU Libraries Postcards to Campus project; and "Nurturing Connection(s) amidst Covid-19 Closures," an ArcGIS StoryMaps project created by OSU graduate student Robin Fifita. The collection also includes crawls of a webpage outlining safety precautions for patrons of the Corvallis Farmers' Market; a website titled "Small Farms, Local Food and Covid-19" produced by the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences; and The Bright Side Project homepage.
Likewise included are crawls of five YouTube videos released by Oregon State University: "A quick word from the Oregon State University faculty" (March 28, 2020); "Social Support in a Time of Physical Distancing" (April 1, 2020); "We're Here for You" (April 8, 2020); "A Message from Academic Advisors at Oregon State" (April 15, 2020); and "Thanks to Our Staff" (April 28, 2020).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.