This article appeared in the Volume 2, Issue 1 Spring/Summer 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue.
Researching in a Pandemic
Lloyd Tomlinson
I defended the prospectus for my dissertation in February, and immediately started filling out funding applications and planning for a summer of research. A couple of weeks after that is when I first remember hearing about the coronavirus. By March, West Virginia University had made the decision to shift all classes online and to not have students return for the second half of the semester. Accompanying that decision was a moratorium on all travel related to university travel. By that time, all of the archives I had planned to visit had closed either indefinitely or with a planned reopening far into the summer.
Like many scholars, I have had to adjust significantly to life under stay-at-home orders. I had done an internship at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, DE, last summer, which happens to hold most of the archival resources I had planned to use for my dissertation. I was able to look at some of the material and take a few photographs over the course of the six-week internship, so I at least had something to work with once the stay-at-home orders went into effect. A large number of the newspaper sources I planned to use have also been digitized and are accessible for free through sites such as the Virginia Chronicle. I have also been going through secondary materials. The amount of materials I have access to has not been as limited as it has been for some, and the summer will not be as much of a loss as it could have been.
I am one of several researchers that the West Virginia and Regional History Center recommends for independent research work. I had taken on a couple of contracts before the pandemic hit, and the closure of the WVRHC and WVU libraries has severely hindered my abilities to complete those contracts. My clients have luckily been understanding, and I will be able to get back to work on those once the libraries open fully.
In short, my experience with COVID-19 has been a complex one. In these weird times, scholars certainly need to be adaptable.
Lloyd Tomlinson, originally from Pennington Gap, Virginia, currently resides in Morgantown, West Virginia, with his wife, Carlie, and his cat, Eleanor. He is a PhD candidate at West Virginia University. He is currently working on his dissertation, “Stonega Coke & Coal Company Towns in Wise County, VA, since the New Deal,” supervised by Dr. Ken Fones-Wolf. You can reach him at tomlinson.lloyd@gmail.com
