MSUM COVID-19 Community History Project

The COVID-19 Pandemic has become a unique and significant part of world history. As these historic events continue to affect our everyday lives at Minnesota State University Moorhead and the greater Moorhead community, the MSUM Archives plans to document self-experiences in the form of a community history project to help record our daily lived experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic. We also plan to collect documents, photographs, videos, and more that pertain to how COVID-19 is affecting the community.

Because every individual’s experience is different and valued, the Archives will provide expanded documentation on the COVID-19 Pandemic experiences for current and future researchers and make it easily accessible through our physical and digital collections, freely available on the internet. We have no way of knowing how significant of an event this may be at this time, but we want to ensure we leave behind a substantial record of our experiences for future scholars and historians.

To expand understanding about the COVID-19 Pandemic experience to current and future individuals, the MSUM Archives will collect documentation and accept donations on the COVID-19 Pandemic experiences for inclusion in the Archives. These materials will be made available through our physical and digital collections. Examples of physical and digital collections can be found by searching our University Collection Guides, NMHC Collection Guides, Minnesota Reflections, or RED: Institutional Repository websites.

The Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM) Archives is comprised of two repositories: the University Archives and the Northwest Minnesota Historical Center.

The mission of the MSUM Archives is to appraise, collect, organize, describe, and preserve documentation of the history of Minnesota State University Moorhead and northwest Minnesota; to provide reference assistance to MSUM administrators, faculty and staff, students, alumni, and off-campus researchers; and to make collections visible through finding aids, webpages, exhibits, and social media.

The University Archives, created in 1978, is the official repository of MSUM that documents the history of the University and the people affiliated with it. The records span from the founding of the Moorhead Normal School in 1887 to the present.

The Northwest Minnesota Historical Center (NMHC) was established in 1972 by the Minnesota Historical Society in conjunction with the University’s History Department as a regional research repository to collect and preserve the history of the twelve county region of northwest Minnesota. Presently, the NMHC is operated and administered by the Livingston Lord Library. The NMHC contains manuscripts, oral history interviews, photographs, family histories, and more dating as far back as the 1860s.