In March 2020, Stony Brook University Libraries began documenting campus communications and the events locally unfolding as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged across the world. These efforts evolved into a larger rapid-response collecting project planned and managed remotely. Documenting COVID-19: Stony Brook University Experiences was developed to preserve institutional history and experiences. With a collecting scope of personal narratives, photographs, and oral histories, the initiative presented new opportunities and challenges for Stony Brook University Libraries. This study discusses the oral history methods for the project from concept to implementation. It describes the planning and managing processes for the oral histories and considers the ethics of recording trauma experiences contemporaneously during the pandemic. The authors offer practical guidance for developing and processing a rapid-response collection of oral histories in a remote environment.
Kristen Nyitray began her immersion in video games with an Atari 2600 and ColecoVision console and checking out games from her local public library. Later in life, she had the opportunity to start building a video game studies collection in her professional career as an archivist and special collections librarian. While that project has since ended, you get the benefit of her expansive knowledge of video game sources in “Game On to Game After: Sources for Video Game History.” There is much in this column to help librarians wanting to support research in this important entertainment form. Ready player one?—Editor
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