How this is done depends on a museums focus. To get a sense of how and what museums are collecting, Mashable spoke with curators and directors organizing collections at the Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and Anacostia Community Museum, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, and the National Women's History Museum.

The NMAAHC, for instance, reached out to 400 organizations and people it has relationships with to collect materials, which focus on the Black experience in the U.S. Curators are asking people to share stories about their social experiences throughout the pandemic. The stories of Black Americans over centuries have been ignored or muted," Bill Pretzer, a curator for the NMAAHC, says, noting that the museum's very existence addresses this.

Curators have also put together a community curation website, which people register for, in order to collect images of things like Black Lives Matter printed masks, protest signs, written stories, or uploaded journal entries. (Others, like the Los Angeles Public Library and the Anacostia Community Museum, have similar online portals.)

At the Museum of the City of New York, Sean Corcoran, the head of prints and photography for the museum, and his team have added another approach. Using the hashtags #CovidStoriesNYC and #ActivistNY, theyve asked people to upload pictures on social media, which Corcoran and his team then comb through. For now, select images submitted to #CovidStoriesNYC will be reposted on the museum's social media channels and its website, while the images submitted to #ActivistNY are being uploaded to the museum's ongoing (and currently digital) collection of the same name. He's found, thus far, that using hashtags allows for a broad interpretation for what can be submitted, which he says welcomes a wide variety of voices and stories. (Corcoran estimates 5,000 to 6,000 photos were uploaded in the first two months of #CovidStoriesNYC's debut.)

Continued here:

How museums are (inclusively) documenting the pandemic, protests - Mashable