The experience of documenting the 2017 wildfires prepared us for preserving Sonoma County’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020. The Sonoma Responds project was an online archive that invited our community to collectively build the historical record of living through COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement and the impacts of these events on daily life locally. Members of the public could upload a photo, audio/video file, or PDF that embodied their experiences and impressions of life in lockdown. We also encouraged people to nominate a website, webpage, blog post, news article, or online video for inclusion in the web archives. the like,data most submissions were from content creators, nominating their music videos, journals and blogs. These included singer/songwriter Chris Herrod’s album, I Don’t Play Xmas Songs, I Play Coronavirus Songs (watch all 10 tracks by clicking the “play” button in the Wayback banner at the top of the page). Michael Mann created a series of live journal entries on his blog “riding the viral apocalypse” that documented the mundane to the surreal happenings of pandemic life. “Book of Days: A Covid Kitchen Chronicle” was created by Liat Goldman Douglas, who described herself as “a mom and elementary school teacher presently working with a neighborhood Pandemic Pod of Tk-2nd graders; baking my way through and sharing my story as I go.”
An image from the archived page “Book of Days: A Covid Kitchen Chronicle” by List Goldman Douglas
Another notable submission encapsulating that time was a crowdsourced list of Black-owned restaurants and businesses in Sonoma County, an effort that has since been expanded to include Native, POC-immigrant, and people of color-owned businesses.