Victoria Regional History Center

The Victoria Regional History Center is documenting personal experiences and stories of the University of Houston-Victoria and Victoria College students, staff, and faculty, as well as the surrounding Victoria community, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We ask that you record your stories and share them with the University Archives of the aforementioned institutions and the Victoria Regional History Center, for preservation in our institution’s historical records.

How to Participate

We want to know your stories with how you adjusted to completing school online from home, working remotely, and home-schooling your children. If your job was deemed “essential” and you maintained working on-campus or on-site during these quarantine times, what was it like and what differences did you notice in job performance and responsibilities?

What have you been doing for entertainment with public entertainment closed? Have you learned a new skill or expanded on an existing hobby?

The University Archives in the Victoria Regional History Center will be collecting your stories to compile in a “born-digital” collection. These stories are to preserve the personal viewpoints of the University of Houston-Victoria community, Victoria College community, and the whole Victoria County community.

Your story submissions can be as creative or straight-forward as you would like, including pictures of drawings or paintings, poems, written stories, audio recordings for oral histories, or short video submissions.

Submission process

The Victoria Regional History Center has created a form that you may fill out and submit to our staff for review. You do not need to login to your student or employee Microsoft account. Within the form, there is a mandatory field of consent for the Victoria Regional History Center to use your story submission in a future, digital history collection, for academic, research, historical, archival, and leisure purpose. These submissions will be accessible online to students, staff, faculty, outside researchers, and the public.

You must be at least 18 years old to participate.

You do not need to send in a submission immediately. The Victoria Regional History Center will be collecting materials for an undetermined amount of time.

Submissions will not be available to the public immediately, in our digital history collection. The Center staff will review submissions and work to compile the collection. After they are processed, they will become available. You may contribute your story and choose to remain anonymous, by selecting “remain anonymous” in the name field; however, you must submit your name to the consent portion. This will be used for staff records only and will not be made public in the collection.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Katie Howell and Tyler Cline of J. Murrey Atkins Library, University of North Carolina Charlotte for allowing us to use text and ideas from UNCC’s “Contribute Your Stories of the COVID-19 Outbreak” website to model our project.