A huge sign draped in front of a Richmond bar reads: “I assure you we’re sort of open! Some days.”
Another in Colonial Williamsburg has George Washington wearing a face mask.
The message board outside of the Hampton Coliseum flashes: “This is just an intermission.”
These are signs of COVID-19 times and the Library of Virginia wants them. The state’s archival agency is asking the public to take photos of pandemic signage and images of how the virus has impacted the community and upload them to its Tumblr page.
The Library of Virginia houses state and local government records and the official response to a crisis, including pandemics. It also has a focus of cataloging how the state’s citizens respond. In mid-April, as the state’s schools, parks and businesses closed, the library realized it needed to capture what that looked like.
While some storefronts taped printed government memos on their doors, individuals drew posters to hang in their windows or stuck signs in their yards that declared, “We will get through this together.”
Some of the imagery can easily be captured on a printed sign, such as empty grocery store shelves and lines of masked people waiting to shop.
“Institutionally, we asked ourselves, “How do we document this?” said Dale Neighbors, the library’s visual studies collection coordinator.
Richmond, Va. (May 2020)
The library’s Spanish Flu pandemic collection has a thick depository of newspapers when it comes to documenting how thousands of Virginians died between 1918 and 1919. It has few visuals though to show the day-to-day of how Virginia was coping.
“People aren’t always self-aware to collect in the moment,” Neighbors said. But photos can tell a more complete picture, he said.
“It’s hard to piece together what daily life was like without other types of ephemera,” Neighbors said.
For its “Signs of the Time: COVID-19 in Virginia” project, the library wants people to take a photo, note the date and place, and submit it to the page. The library currently has more than 260 images, primarily from central Virginia. Neighbors said he would love to have more statewide representation, especially from Hampton Roads.
Some of the signs that were up a month ago are already gone or changing as the state slowly eases restrictions.
“We’ll keep collecting as long as the signs are there,” Neighbors said. “That will be a nice documentation of how we move out of this.”
Denise M. Watson, 757-446-2504,denise.watson@pilotonline.com
