DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — With hundreds of thousands of items in their collections, the Los Angeles Public Library is practically a museum. Suzanne Im is the Acting Senior Librarian of Digitization and Special Collections, and her job is to ensure all the library's resources are accessible to every Angeleno.

“The library has a long history of collecting and some of those items that were acquired in the early 20th Century are now really rare and important,” said Im.

One of those items is The Liberator, one of L.A.'s first African-American newspapers, and they were able to digitize it with the help of the state program California Revealed. With a mission to collect Los Angeles history, LAPL is starting the Safer at Home Archive, a new digital collection of user-submitted artifacts the library can archive and preserve for future generations.

Artifacts the Los Angeles Public Library is looking for include letters, emails, journals, notices or signs, blog and social media posts, and creative art such as drawings, paintings, and poetry.

“Well historians, they’re not necessarily writing the history right now, and it’s the responsibility of archives to collect these items for the historical record,” said Im.

After studying political science and women studies at Occidental College, Im was drawn to librarianship as a grassroots way of engaging the community, so she wants to make sure stories by those affected by COVID-19 gets told by everyone.

“We want it to be inclusive of diverse perspectives, whether you’re an essential worker, a nurse, or if you’re a working mother who’s now homeschooling her kids, you know, we want to see that come in,” said Im.

When Farida Waquar was laid off, she had to move out of her apartment and in with her family. After posting about her experience on her social media, she decided to share it with the Safer at Home Archive.

“The whole concept of time capsules has always been something cool," said Waquer. "I’ve never contributed to one before, and given this historic global pandemic, I was like, this is definitely going to make history and I want to be a part of this and I have a really interesting story to share."

Now her memories will be shared with others in the future.

“Some people think famous people are the only ones who make history, but we are all actually eye witnesses to history because the COVID-19 pandemic affects us all and we all have a perspective that is important and that we can share,” said Im.