Social isolation, cancelled events, missed anniversaries, home schooling, financial worries, working from home, travel restrictions, empty streets, social pressure to follow the rules. These are just a few of the experiences that many of us are dealing with in the age of COVID-19. Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council Museum Services needs your help to document the impact that the pandemic is having on your daily lives.

This is a unique moment in our history and Museum Services want to ensure that personal stories and experiences are recorded now to create a publicly accessible archive for future generations through its newly launched ‘Dear Diary’ project.

Encouraging individuals, families, and groups to get involved, the Mayor of Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council Councillor Sean Bateson said: “This pandemic has created a way of life which none of us have ever experienced before and Council’s Museum Services recognise the importance of preserving this through personal stories for future reference. The every-day experience can easily be overlooked in formal histories and we want to ensure this doesn’t happen. Please get involved with this very worthwhile initiative and recognise that your story, whatever it may be at this time, is worth telling.”

From the mundane to the extraordinary, Museum Services want to hear from you. You can capture your experiences through photography, video, paintings, crafts, diaries, stories, poems, songs, audio recordings or create a digital diary and send your thoughts and observations to be archived for generations to come.

Personal stories can easily be overlooked in formal histories covering large scale events. This project will emphasise the importance of individual experiences – learning from our work with the Decade of Centenaries, local and personal voices from the time have played a vital role in helping us understand what went on.

The archive:

You can have a look at our PROJECT posts to see some of the material sent in, or have a look at the full collection in the ARCHIVE.

How to participate:

You can capture your experiences through photography, video, paintings, crafts, diaries, stories, poems, songs, audio recordings or any other way you choose.

Submissions can be emailed to cms@causewaycoastandglens.gov.uk or sent in through one of our Facebook pages:

• Ballycastle Museum

• Ballymoney Museum

• Coleraine Museum

• Limavady & Green Lane Museum

Written or hardcopy entries can be scanned or photographed and submitted electronically. If you’d like to record your story, but want it kept private for a fixed period of time, you can do that too. Just let us know when you send it in to us.

Now for the GDPR stuff:

Thank you for sharing your memories with Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Museum Services as part of the ‘Dear Diary: Recording Life in the Age of Covid-19’ project.

All material submitted as part of the project will be preserved in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulations (May 2018) as a permanent public reference resource for use in research, publication, education, lectures, broadcasting and web archiving, and made available on an open access basis unless you state otherwise.

Your recording will be securely archived and managed in perpetuity by Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council’s Museum Services.