By Leah Best, Head of Knowledge
FOR OUR TIME Collecting BC’s Pandemic Experiences
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or Our Time is the name we’ve chosen for an organization-wide project to contextualize British Columbians’ diverse experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Spanning seven departments and involving more than 25 staff, For Our Time is a pandemic archive that began in March 2020 and will continue for years to come. More than a collecting project, it is also driving changes in our practice, including the creation of our first crowdsourced collection through submissions to the
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project websites rbcm.ca/yourstory. It has also been a flashpoint for discussing the act of collecting material culture. Whose experiences do we collect? What biases must we acknowledge, and how do we ensure they are not reflected as gaps in our efforts to document the pandemic? Should we collect at all, at this time, when so many are living with great hardship? These questions, and many more, have been central to framing the direction and scope of our work.
