Collecting Current Events
We are living history right now. Future students of the past will look back on this moment and ask, what was it like? How did it feel to live through this devastating interruption of normal life and the largest social movement in our nation’s history?
In Real Time is a collecting initiative of the DC History Center that began in April 2020. It calls upon the public to assist in documenting this year’s historic events. While the media and official government repositories document each public step, they cannot capture your daily reality. Yet what you are living now, day to day, is the stuff of history. And collecting documentation of daily life is the constant, if ever evolving, job of the DC History Center.
How to Participate
Here’s how you can contribute to our In Real Time initiative. Many of your submissions will become part of the permanent collection!
1. Participate in our story bank and photograph your experiences.
Contribute your first-person narrative through prompts designed to capture varied local experiences through short answers. Answer any or all of the questions, at any time.
Photograph your experiences. Submit 1-10 high resolution photos via email to collections@dchistory.org. For each photo, please include your description of what you photographed, neighborhood or ward where it was taken, and the date. Names and addresses are welcome, as are actual captions. Please note: while rights are retained by the creators, the DC History Center may use these submissions across multiple platforms.
See here for full terms and conditions.
Caution: As organizations such as Blackivists and Documenting the Now explain, there are critical safety and privacy issues that take priority over capturing the moment for posterity when it comes to contemporaneous protest, memorial, and vigil documentation. Therefore for stories that address Black Lives Matter protests, for example, we ask that contributors focus on written submissions. If visual documentation is submitted, no people other than the contributor and their family should be identifiable in any photographs.
2. Document your experiences in writing and through videos, artwork, photographs, and recordings.
Maintain a journal – digitally and/or with good old-fashioned pen-and-paper – for personal catharsis as well as for potential future donation to the DC History Center. Contact us with questions or to add your contact information to the list of community story keepers we will maintain.
3. Collect materials that could contribute to a Covid-19 time capsule.
Gather or take note of physical materials that reflect the current reality. We’ll publish instructions on how to submit these once the pandemic subsides and we reopen the DC History Center.
Important: Please do not remove a sign or item if it is currently in use.
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- Designate a box or small space to gather materials that might be taken into the Historical Society collection. Due to our limited storage, we are looking only for paper material and small objects that illustrate how the pandemic changed daily life. For example:
- An empty, labeled bottle that demonstrates how local distilleries switched from producing alcohol to making hand sanitizer
- A home-made personal mask
- Signs or other ephemera warning residents to maintain social distance.
Contact the DC History Center with questions about whether an item is suitable. For each item you collect, record when and where it was found.
Send questions about the In Real Time initiative to collections@dchistory.org.
Stay safe, stay home, and please consider sharing how you and your household are experiencing this unprecedented time.
Other Local Repositories
Many of our partners are documenting the pandemic. Please consider contributing to:
DC Public Library: #ArchiveThisMomentDC
Anacostia Community Museum: Moments of Resilience
Capital Jewish Museum: Covid-19 Collecting
Chevy Chase Historical Society: Corona Chronicles
Montgomery County Historical Society: Covid-19 Archive
Maryland Historical Society: Collecting in Quarantine
Arlington Public Library: Quaranzine