State Archives launches project to document Arizona’s COVID-19 response
Jun 24, 2020, 4:15 AM
PHOENIX – Arizona State Archives launched an online project this week to document the state’s response the coronavirus outbreak in the state.
The Archives Digital Emergency Preparedness team is gathering information to document how state agencies, counties, municipalities and tribes share information with the public during the health crisis.
“Websites and social media are the main ways that public bodies communicate directly with the public, therefore they are a rich source for future historians and researchers to see how our state, county and local governments reacted to the pandemic,” lead archivist Carlos Lopez said in a press release Monday.
The program captures text, photos and audiovisual files from dozens of agency websites to document the day-by-day changes in information.
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“Web content is meant to be relevant to the right now, therefore it changes rapidly to stay current,” electronic records archivist Laura Keller said in the release. “With COVID-19, that content is changing even faster, not just day-to-day, but hour-to-hour. If we don’t capture it now, it will be gone forever.”
The project started in mid-March utilizing Archive-It, a part of the Internet Archive which is used to capture the material.
The State Archives has used Archive-It since 2012 to document the state’s presence on the web for a number of historical collections, like the 2016 presidential election or Arizona’s centennial.
