Documenting Community: CU Boulder Libraries Student Reflections

Drew Gaines -  3 - DCTP - thumbnail sepia - adaptation.jpg

Adapted from Drew Gaines

University Memorial Center, March 2020

The Documenting Community, 2020 project began with a conversation.  Special Collections & Archives' students were, like their fellow students across campus, struggling with loss:  their semesters, the close proximity of their friends, and the many markers of accomplishment of their university careers. 

For Special Collection's intern Drew Gaines, the changes “made me think about the loss of cultural rituals.”  She shared: “The thing about them is it’s not just graduation but also funerals, birthdays, weddings, all these monumental events that are sentimental in person, but are now gone (quoted in Bruner, "Students Document Life and Loss during Pandemic"). 

So, during the second week of March, 2020, initial conversations evolved into a project.  Documenting Community, 2020 offered our students a path for creating, gathering, and processing their own responses to the COVID-19 pandemic for the archive. 

Highlights of these are seen here through documentary photography and through interviews aimed at creating oral histories of the period.

CU Boulder Libraries Student Reflections