The COVID Tracking Project, a crowdsourced digital archive documenting the face of the pandemic in the United States, will become part of the permanent collection in the UCSF Archives & Special Collections and will be accessible to researchers and the public.
The project was launched by The Atlantic to address the lack of reliable information about the pandemic, was volunteer-driven and published data on COVID-19 testing, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. The information gathered was cited by major journals and many news stories and used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the federal Food and Drug Administration.
This collaborative project brings together teams from The COVID Tracking Project team, the California Digital Library, and UCSF Archives & Special Collections. It will provide impetus for developing tools and new approaches for archiving collections, comprising diverse formats from instant messages to source code to emails as well as data sets.The COVID Tracking Project has already published its primary dataset in the Dryad data repository and the team anticipate that within a year this remarkable born-digital collection will be preserved and made accessible online.
This archive joins other publicly-accessible UCSF archives on the community HIV/AIDS epidemic response, tobacco industry, the opioid industry, and the food industry.
For more, see:
· UCSF to House COVID Tracking Project, a National Database Donated by The Atlantic