Whether the global pandemic has spurred you into starting a journal or you’ve been documenting your daily life for years, your personal notes on life in the time of coronavirus may be just what the National Archives is looking for.
As part of the project Memorja (memory), the Archives is urging citizens to keep a diary about their day-to-day life so that our descendants may know what it was like for the average person during this unprecedented time in global history.
The Memorja project kicked off a few years ago with the aim of collecting and recording the oral history of wartime Malta and preserving the memories of some of the oldest members of society.
Archivists have been seeking out nonagenarians and octogenarians for the past three years to preserve their knowledge on topics such as British expat-riates, emigration, World War II and bell ringing.
We want to capture the parts of history that don’t make it onto the official record
“Our job is to record and preserve people’s memories,” National Archives CEO Charles Farrugia told Times of Malta.
“In relation to COVID-19, we want to capture the parts of history that don’t make it onto the official record. Documents and numbers and statistics produced by the government are automatically recorded, but we rarely see the other dimension to this: what people are experiencing in practice while these things are happening.
“We can see this from the records we’ve kept in the time of plague and the Spanish flu pandemics. We can say with certainty what the numbers were and how the government responded, but we don’t have voices from the people themselves. This is what we’d like to capture.”
The National Archives is interested in as wide a perspective as possible, hoping to hit professions such as the tourism industry, which has effectively ground to a halt, or teachers, who have reinvented the running of classrooms in a short time.
Anyone who would like to keep a diary throughout the pandemic may deposit it with the National Archives once things return more or less to normal.
“So far, the response has been surprisingly positive considering the project has only been public for a few days,” Farrugia said.
“We hope to get more, however, so that we can build a solid picture of what we are experiencing as a collective right now and be able to pass that knowledge down to our future generations.”