Speaker
Description
This paper takes as its starting a quote from Jeremy Farrar’s book Spike: the virus vs the people (2021): “There was great science…there was science that could have been better…and there was bad science…”. This captures a sense of the extraordinary response of the scientific community to the pandemic through innovation and collaboration on both a national and international scale. Archives also responded, through adaptations to services at lightning speed, and undertaking rapid-response collecting initiatives. Most of the collecting that has taken place in the UK has related to the so-called ‘socio-cultural record’ of Covid-19, that is the acquisition of personal testimonies, objects and ephemera from patients, front-line clinicians and the general public. To date, however, much less collecting has taken place to document the pandemic’s ‘scientific record’. Reporting on the interim findings of my AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship on ‘Documenting the role of UK science in the Covid-19 pandemic’ (September 2022 to July 2023), this paper will consider the challenges and opportunities this area of collecting presents to the archives and records management communities. Key themes include discoverability, digital archiving and advocacy for the archive and archive processes.
