LOS ANGELES — One of the most striking things to have come across Suzanne Im's desk this year came from a surprising source: Spokane, Washington.

"When we put out our call, we said the scope was L.A. County," Im said. But, for some reason, a woman sent in a story of her brother. "That her brother passed away from COVID, and she talked about how he believed what politicians were saying, that it wasn't real. But that he caught it and passed away."

Im is the acting senior librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library's Digitization and Special Collections and oversees the COVID-19 Community Archive, a repository of text and images submitted by Angelenos throughout the pandemic.

Already, LAPL's digital collection system has hundreds of photos, poems, artworks, lists, and journal entries showing what people are dealing with during the pandemic.

It's a continuation (in spirit, at least) of the library's longstanding Mobile Memory Lab, in which LAPL librarians would hold workshops, helping people create their own digital archives of their memories — and, if they feel so inclined, share those digital archives with the library.

"This is kind of a new endeavor for us, in that we hadn't collected digital materials through a form before," Im said. "It's interesting to see the descriptions that people put in because we're not there to prompt them like we do at programs."

At workshops, the librarians ask patrons open-ended questions, drawing their thoughts out. But left to their own devices, with only the form and their memories in front of them, they're free to ruminate.

As Ericka Kreutz did, with a photo of her 7-year-old son, taking part in his first social Zoom call.

"I left the room and came back to see him drawing on his face with a marker, looking into his friends' faces in this virtual world. Many of them were doing the same thing," Kreutz wrote.

"In the past, I may have told him to stop, worried that we would need to quickly wash it off before we had to dash off to who-knows-where. But now, there was nowhere to rush to and my child just needed to be free and silly and creative. I just let him be."

Kreutz is a photographer and actress living near Griffith Park with her sons and husband. When the pandemic hit, she lost her gigs — all of them.

As the weeks of the pandemic turned into months, Kreutz sought out ways to" feed her creative spirit." She began to take on projects: portraits from a distance, a series of photos of people looking from their windows. She'll even pick up her camera to shoot scenes around the house — hence her son's marker-mask Zoom portrait.

"Thank God I have it. Thank God I have photography. I can make jobs for myself. I can tell a story. I can be in the house. Before, I never ever would think about shooting in my dark apartment, but I've had to do that, and it's made me take notice of all the little things I've taken for granted," Kreutz said.

Her submissions to the COVID archive captured those small moments of life with her family. "I feel honored to be a part of it," she said. "It's the everyday journalism of seeing these moments in time. I don't know what memories my children will have of this time. It'll be nice to look back and go, 'This is what I saw. Do you remember any of it?'"

Ana Estrada will undoubtedly always remember the pandemic. It struck as she was transitioning from high school to her first year at Cal State Northridge. In April, needing a job to help pay tuition, she found a local grocery store job.

"It was the first time I'd been out in the streets, seeing people, since the pandemic began," Estrada said. It was scary, she said, knowing that anyone she rang up might be someone with COVID, that any coughing fit might threaten her health and the health of her parents.

When she caught the virus in November, she thought her soreness was just from her workouts. Then it got worse, and she had trouble sleeping, her sense of smell faded, and she had constant sinus irritation. Still, her positive test results were a jolt.

Her parents caught it too, worse than she did. Her father, she learned, was laid out for days.

The entire family kept themselves out of circulation for a month — which meant a month that Estrada could not train.

She's a runner, a track athlete, hoping to walk on to CSUN's team. Running has been her respite during the pandemic when her mental and physical health fell on a downswing.

So when a teacher assigned her and her classmates to submit something to the library's COVID-19 Community archive, she chose three images: a photo of her grocery store's self-checkout, a screenshot of her positive COVID-19 test, and a photo of her circling a dirt track at Balboa Park, taken by her running partner.

"Two of those images, I chose because they connect to each other. That I put my life at risk, as well as all of those other essential workers, my coworkers — some of us have caught COVID, and I wanted to make that connection," Estrada said. "I know it's hard, and we've all done things to adapt. But what I want to say is that my generation — the college students, the essential workers — we've really been feeling the impacts."

More than that, she wants people — today and in the future — to know that working-class people, essential workers, and especially people of color disproportionately suffered because of the virus.

"My best friend works in fast food. I work in a grocery store. My store is Latino-based and Latino-run, and our community is hugely Latino. So what I've seen is that COVID has been hitting us pretty hard."

The library hopes that the archive can get more submissions from communities of color and from throughout the time of the pandemic: from the beginning when stores shelves were bare and streets were empty, to the uprisings and protests during the summer, through the fall and winter. And not just the good and optimistic but also the realities of unemployment and loss that so many people faced.

Personally speaking, Im would love to see more text — letters, or journal and diary entries, for instance. "I feel those fill in a lot of the details of what people are thinking and experiencing. Correspondence, whether written or emailed, even blog posts," Im said. And she's also hoping that people with conservative leanings will chime in — libraries are, after all, homes for intellectual freedom.

And one more group comes to mind, especially as of late: Im hopes to see more submissions from the Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities. There have been relatively few submissions from L.A.'s AAPI communities, which doesn't surprise her.

"But a researcher called me, asking for submissions from Chinatown, and I couldn't find any from community members themselves," Im said. "I hope that will change."

For more on the Los Angeles Public Library's COVID-19 Community Archive, visit lapl.org/covid-archive