The scramble to archive Charlotte's Covid story
Plus: Carowinds delays waterpark opening because of worker shortage; CMS replies to county on budget; Big park purchase will preserve forest; 'Charlotte Squawks' to return, with plenty of material
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Local archivists adapt to preserving data in a digital age; internet history ‘can be hit or miss’
Items being saved by archivists during the Covid pandemic are fewer print materials that will sit on rolling library stacks like these, and more digital and video files that will live in cloud storage and be viewable for generations to come. (Unsplash/C_M)
by Cristina Bolling
When future generations look back on life in Charlotte during the Covid pandemic, what exactly will they find?
Archivists in Charlotte’s libraries, universities and museums have spent the last 15 months racing to preserve stories, data and communications that will help people in the future understand what the Covid pandemic looked like in Charlotte.
From daily infection data to organizations’ internal communications and personal stories of how the pandemic played out in homes, archivists have been collecting information in real time. And the work is ongoing.
“Think of how many times during the pandemic people looked back to (the Spanish flu epidemic of) 1918 and what was happening then, trying to learn from it,” said Dawn Schmitz, UNC Charlotte’s Associate Dean for Special Collections and University Archives. “Because we know what happened then, it helped us to plan and react in the current moment.”
The seriousness of the pandemic and the frenzied pace at which life changed over the past year have highlighted how quickly archivists have to work — which runs counter to the old-school perception of archivists as people who sit in dusty libraries and research things that happened long ago.
“Before, when you worked in archives, you worked with materials that were 50 years old. Now, everywhere, archivists are working with materials that are 5 minutes old, and we’re trying to figure out how to preserve these things,” said Ellen Show, archivist at the Mint Museum. “Instead of worrying, ‘Is this paper going to deteriorate?’ you’re worried about bit rot (when data degrades on objects like hard drives and discs), and do you have enough room or cloud storage to be able to gather and preserve all this digital information?”
Here are a few of the big pandemic archive efforts as explained by the people leading them:
The race to preserve digital media: At Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, the pandemic has brought some urgency to a project that’s already been underway — diversifying the local media that the library archives.
The library already archives local print media, including the Charlotte Observer and local Spanish language newspaper La Noticia, and is working on using web crawlers to capture the many other local media sources that have been reporting on the pandemic.
For now, the worldwide Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine captures some local digital-only media, “but it can be hit or miss with what they’re able to collect,” said Sydney Carroll, a library archivist. (For example, if you plug the Charlotte Ledger’s web address into the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the only thing you’ll see is the Ledger’s main page, not individual posts.)
“There’s going to be a huge focus on diversifying our digital collections,” Carroll said. “It’s important for everyone to see themselves in our collection, whether that’s online or in this place with us.”
Show, of the Mint Museum, said “it keeps me awake at night, thinking about how much digital information is going unpreserved.”
Think about how much of our lives play out over texts and Tweets and other media that aren’t preserved in a formal way, she says. Researchers of the future could learn a lot from those types of communications.
Preserving the public’s first-person accounts: Do you want future generations to know what the pandemic was like at your house? There’s a demand for that.
The Levine Museum of the New South partnered with the Mint Museum around its “Silent Streets” exhibit to collect stories about how the pandemic has impacted Charlotteans, said Eric Scott, Director of Exhibits and Programs at the Levine Museum of the New South. The project received 22 responses, of which excerpts have been included in the Mint’s exhibit. The public is invited to to share their stories by accessing this Google Form.
Johnson C. Smith University is helping lead a joint project called “The Living Archives Project,” which is combined effort between JCSU, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and the Levine Museum of the New South to interview people in Charlotte communities where Covid has hit hard, focusing especially on Black and Latino populations to gather stories and artifacts.
The project, which is being funded by the Duke Endowment, will start next month and will gather materials throughout 2021 and into next year. A site will be created to house the oral histories and tell the story of the pandemic in these zones, said Brandon Lunsford, an archivist at Johnson C. Smith University.
Institutional archives: It may sound tedious, but archivists at institutions like universities and museums have spent much of Covid archiving internal emails, meeting minutes, announcements to the public and internal documents related to Covid.
At the Mint Museum, Show is keeping an institutional archive of emails, information and communication within the museum, and to preserve a record of public-facing announcements and emails, she’s been loading files into the worldwide Internet Archive. Show has been loading pdfs that have been posted on the Mint’s website, as well as email blasts.
UNC Charlotte, Central Piedmont Community College and Charlotte Mecklenburg Library are all also keeping records of every Covid communication and announcement, so future generations can see what happened during the past year.
Collecting stories from people who work in those institutions are also part of their institutional archive.
Show has also been collecting Covid stories from Mint staff, both from questionnaires with story prompts and essays some people have written.
“In 50 years or 100 years, school children are going to be learning about this pandemic that happened in 2020 and they’re going to have dates. On this date the first lockdown occurred. On this date masks were required,” she said. “But they’re going to be dry dates without having examples of what people were saying to each other during that time.”
College students as story collectors: At UNCC, the pandemic archive includes an oral history project in which students interviewed each other on Zoom in the midst of the pandemic, said Tyler Cline, digital archivist at the J. Murrey Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte.
The university also put out a general call to students and staff to fill out a Google questionnaire about their experiences and submit any stories or memorabilia about the pandemic. One student made a video diary of what it was like taking classes online; others shared audio files about their experience.
Oral history projects that were already in the works before the pandemic, like one in response to the 2019 campus shooting and one capturing the stories of Black alumni, “often turned to Covid and life in our times,” said Schmitz.
Looking back at what’s happened with those projects over the last year “made me realize that as we continue to go and do our oral history work, this will be recorded in the natural course of events,” Schmitz said.
At CPCC, archivist Erin Allsop joined forces with journalism instructor Liz Rogers to record stories documenting the experiences of students and staff.
Rogers had students in her Writing for Mass Media class report about how the pandemic was affecting the school community and their own families, and those stories are being professionally stored so they’ll be accessible for future generations.
Allsop, like other archivists, was also tasked with archiving how the pandemic affected the internal workings of the university — workings that were made harder by a cyberattack that took down the college’s computer systems and canceled classes for weeks.
The university’s archives weren’t affected by the cyberattack, Allsop said, because archived files were stored in a separate archive server.
“Fifty years from now, people going to look back and say what were our students doing? We can look at all the public relations records and board of trustees minutes, and that’s all good. But what were our students doing?”
Cristina Bolling is managing editor of The Ledger: cristina@cltledger.com.
Today’s supporting sponsors are Landon A. Dunn, attorney-at-law in Matthews…
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Worker shortage blamed for delayed opening of Carowinds waterpark
Carowinds says it is delaying the reopening of its waterpark until the middle of June because it is having trouble finding enough workers.
“As we’re seeing across a wide range of industries, the availability of labor has been a challenge,” said spokeswoman Lisa Stryker, in an email to The Ledger. Carowinds has pushed back the opening of the waterpark, known as Carolina Harbor, until June 12. It had been scheduled to open May 29. The rest of the park is on track to open May 22.
Bigger picture: Companies in a range of industries say they are having trouble hiring workers as the economy rebounds. In March, the Charlotte area’s unemployment rate was 4.6%, still higher than the 3.7% in March 2020. The region has about 40,000 fewer jobs than it did a year ago. But many employers are ramping up hiring because they feel more confident in the future, as more people are receiving the Covid vaccines.
Carowinds said last month it was working to hire 900 seasonal workers — and that it was offering $500 bonuses to get folks to come aboard. Pushing back the opening of the water park until mid-June would more easily allow the park to hire students, many of whom are in classes until early June. —TM
Carowinds fans will have to wait an additional two weeks for the opening of its waterpark because of troubles finding workers. The park opens May 22, but the waterpark opening is delayed until June 12.
CMS board chair: We ‘can’t get distracted’ by budget spat with county
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education chair Elyse Dashew says CMS isn’t going to be involved in any public “tit-for-tat” with the county over the school system’s budget.
Dashew took to Facebook on Friday in a 3-minute video, responding to last week’s proposal by County Manager Dena Diorio to withhold $56M from CMS until the district outlines a plan to bridge disparities. The county is proposing to give CMS $549M if it can devise such a plan. “We expect to get some outcomes for the money we are giving them,” Diorio said.
CMS leaders have bristled at Diorio’s suggestion and say the schools need the full amount.
Dashew said that board’s job “is to present a budget request that accurately reflects what our students need in order to be successful academically, and that’s what we’ve done.”
She said she acknowledged that “we have a lot of work to do in CMS to educate all students well. We have some huge disparities, just like we have disparities throughout our community.”
She continued:
We hold ourselves accountable for that work, and we respect you, the voters, who hold us accountable for that work. Just a reminder that the county commission is not an oversight board.
A lot of people want us to go tit-for-tat right now and negotiate this budget in the media or on social media, and we’re not going to do that. We just can’t get distracted right now.
CMS statistics show wide gaps by race and between low- and high-poverty schools in many measures, including career readiness in all subjects, ACT scores, high school absenteeism, disciplinary measures and completion of college-level classes. CMS has a 2024 Strategic Plan, adopted in 2019, to address those differences. It calls for decreasing absenteeism and ensuring access to great teachers and to advanced coursework.
It’s unclear how much progress CMS has made on the plan, because the last update on the district’s website is from 2019. Last year, leaders were consumed with devising a response to Covid. Although some researchers warned that virtual instruction would worsen educational inequalities, the CMS board said instruction needed to stay virtual much of the year for student and staff safety. —TM
Big park purchase: 100 more acres for Reedy Creek Nature Preserve
In one of its biggest recent purchases for parks, Mecklenburg County has bought 100 acres for an addition to Reedy Creek Nature Preserve.
The 100-acre parcel is located near the intersection of East W.T. Harris Boulevard and The Plaza — sort of between east Charlotte and University City. It’s behind Northridge Middle School and CPCC’s Cato Campus. The county bought the land from Cox Media Group, owner of WSOC-TV. Satellite images seem to show a large antenna and a few buildings on the property.
The county’s plan is to keep the land, which is mostly mature hardwood forest, as primarily undeveloped — no parking lots or ballfields, for example. But the purchase will help in the development of the Reedy Creek Greenway, a 2-mile trail that is in the design phase.
“It’s primarily a natural resource acquisition,” says Bert Lynn, the director of the county’s Park and Recreation Department’s capital planning division. As far as park land purchases go, this is a big one, Lynn told The Ledger. By his calculations, the county averaged about 300 acres a year for the last five or six years.
National rankings often place Mecklenburg County low for its amount of green space and parks. Residents also sometimes complain that developers are gobbling up all the land and clearcutting trees to accommodate the city’s rapid growth. —TM
No joke: ‘Charlotte Squawks’ to return in August
Just as life in Charlotte seems to be returning to normal, rest assured that there will soon be somebody to make fun of it all.
“Charlotte Squawks” — a variety show that pokes fun at life in Charlotte — is returning for its 16th season, co-creator Brian Kahn tells The Ledger. He wrote in an email:
We are on! Live in the Booth Theater Aug. 19 through Sept. 12 … assuming the planet is still here (we’re working with Elon Musk in the event that it is not).
Kahn, a partner at law firm McGuireWoods, somehow has enough creative energy leftover from his work as a commercial litigator to write most of the material for the annual production, which skipped last year because of Covid. He’s the co-creator of “Squawks” along with WFAE “Charlotte Talks” host Mike Collins, who sings and tells jokes in the show along with an ensemble cast of actual talented local actors.
Targets of the show in recent years have included electric scooters, creepy Morris-Jenkins TV commercials, traffic on I-485, people who post on Nextdoor and Ballantyne. —TM
Cryptic message about future of beloved local newsletter provider
We have it on good authority that The Charlotte Ledger, a growing and thriving locally owned media company, will be announcing the addition of two newsletters this week.
Stay tuned.
In brief:
Bob & Sheri back on Charlotte airwaves: Longtime morning radio show hosts Bob & Sheri were dropped by their hometown station 107.9 WLNK-FM last month, but they signed a deal Friday night that puts them back on Charlotte airwaves. They’ll have the morning show on 104.7 WKQC-FM starting later this month. They’re on in 69 other stations nationwide. (Observer, subscriber-only) According to March radio ratings for Charlotte from Nielsen obtained by The Ledger, WLNK was 12th in the 6-10 a.m. slot in total weekly listeners, while WKQC was tied for fourth.
Slaveholding past: Wingate University says it only recently discovered that it was named after a slaveholder, and it is meeting with the community to determine next steps. “It casts a shadow over our university, my alma mater, and is not in keeping with who we are today,” the university’s president said in a statement. It’s a liberal-arts college with about 3,600 students in Union County. (WBTV)
500+ homes for UCity? A developer is proposing plans for a neighborhood of more than 500 homes on University City Boulevard at I-485. The rezoning petition by Red Sea Properties of Pineville calls for 135 townhomes and 390 single-family lots on four parcels totaling 120 acres.
More park visitors: The number of visitors to state parks increased last year by 6.5%. “People were seeking something that they could do that was active, that was away from their house, where they felt safe during the pandemic,” a state parks spokeswoman said. (WFAE/Queens University News Service)
Theaters getting back in action: The Neighborhood Theatre in NoDa is on the verge of reopening, with its first show scheduled for June 17: Graham Sharp, the banjo player for a bluegrass group called Steep Canyon Rangers. The marquee on the theater, which for months read “F U Covid 19,” now says “We are back.” (Observer) In other theater news, Theatre Charlotte is rebuilding after a December fire. It’s staging performances in other locations and plans to reopen by the fall of 2022, its executive director told The Observer.
Foul smell: South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control has ordered the New Indy paper plant to fix its level of air contaminants that are causing a rotten egg smell from Indian Land to Ballantyne to Waxhaw. (WBTV)
Genesis to rock Spectrum Center: Tickets went on sale Friday for a concert by Genesis at the Spectrum Center on Nov. 20. The lowest priced ticket on Ticketmaster on Sunday night was $200. Charlotte is the third stop on a 14-city North American tour called “The Last Domino?” Phil Collins, age 70, doesn’t play the drums anymore because of a back injury and is “unable to stand for long periods of time … [and] sings from a chair,” Rolling Stone reported.
Normal classes are back: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools returns to five-day-a-week in-person instruction this week. Students had been at home on Wednesdays. There are three weeks left in the school year.
Taking stock
Unless you are a day trader, checking your stocks daily is unhealthy. So how about weekly? How local stocks of note fared last week (through Friday’s close), and year to date:
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory