I'm curious what kind of efforts are put into this with so many sources that are also mutable. We have news agencies silently updating articles, tweets being removed, entire forums closed down, etc. How much active effort is put into preservation? How is the scope of what is recorded determined? Who funds these efforts? I guess these questions are more about contemporary history in general, but I presume the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic has put some emphasis on recording this historical period.
This question gets into some of my expertise that isn’t usually showcased on Reddit since you’re really getting into a methodology question. To start off, digital humanities is a field and methodology with digital history as a subset of that, and both are known colloquially as DH. (The boundary between DH and DH is blurry and has its own discussions that can go along with it.) DH has undergone several phases. Phases doesn't mean a type of project becomes outdated or historians drop that method, its more in reference to they kinds of projects historians are starting to develop for our discipline and what's new. In the early days, a digital historian could digitize resources and put them on a website and be on the cutting edge. Phase two added more interpretation and interaction like online exhibits. Phase three brought more tools and methods into historical work- podcasts, network analysis, mapping, etc. The next phase is expanding into multimedia projects, critical studies of the digital, and even AR/VR. Historians are even teaming up with programmers and computer scientists to create tools for doing research. See “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History” in The Journal of American History (Sept. 2008) where Steven Mintz talks about this progression in a conversation with several DHers for more.
Digital collections started in those early days, and you can see how digital historians changed this work overtime with the examples I'll link to later. Your post notes the crucial problem with these collections- digital things change or disappear, and we are overwhelmed with the amount of digital things to collect. Roy Rosenzweig's landmark essay "Scarcity of Abundance? Preserving the Past" tackles this question. What happens to content hidden behind paywalls or the array of copyrights to navigate? How do you save digital things- a floppy disk, a USB, the Cloud? Will all that physical infrastructure survive, or can you guarantee the parts to fix a CD reader for the next hundred years? How long can the Internet Archive actually last? Are personal documents on an old laptop going to make their way to an archive like 18th century diaries have? Even beyond these questions, the impulse is to save it all, but the nature of archival work is to be selective: how do historians and archivists negotiate this tension? No one has the answers to all these questions yet, but you can check out The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation by Trevor Owens and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Research by Ian Milligan to learn more about this problem and how historians are facing it.
Rosenzweig established the standard of “digital history” in 1994 when he founded the Center for History and New Media, a place filled with wonderful historians doing excellent work (Full disclosure- I work there and that description may seemed biased, but I'm underselling the caliber of people I work with and the projects they produce). He also wrote the handbook for doing digital history with Daniel Cohen: Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. The first born-digital project entered into the Library of Congress came from CHNM after 9/11. The September 11 Digital Archive gathered 150,000 items which includes personal accounts, emails, and images. CHNM also created the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank in 2005 which holds 25,000 items. Mills Kelly and Sheila Brennan discuss online collections here based on these projects. These projects come with challenges- how do you limit your collections, who can contribute, what privacy is offered, and how much human power is required behind the scenes to ensure they work? The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank discusses the challenges of scraping the Internet for specific tags, but someone needs to verify its relevance. How often do you search for a hashtag on Twitter and find spam or unrelated content? Imagine trying to collect from there while filtering out anything outside the scope of the subject. And consider that many subjects historians would want to collect involve trauma- people may not want to share their experiences related to events like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and COVID. Kelly and Brennan talk about the privacy concerns and the tension within collection between verifying accounts vs. anonymity.
A lot of that is not related to your question about COVID and preservation, but this is the landscape of digital collection projects. CHNM has two current projects related to the pandemic (another disclosure- I don't work on either of these, so if my supervisor sees this then any errors throughout this post are because its 3am and not because I daydreamed in a staff meeting or class). Pandemic Religion: A Digital Archive is a crowd sourced project open for contribution on COVID's effects on religious practices. Collecting These Times: American Jewish Experiences of the Pandemic is similar, but clearly specified for the American Jewish experience and is in collaboration with other partners as a hub for multiple collection projects. Both are open for collections from people who come across the website, but there is also outreach to communities to seek accounts and items. You can even find historians adding interpretation to these collections like Jess Pritchard-Ritter's exhibit on congregation and community or the teaching guides that bring the current moment into history class.
If you Google "COVID-19 digital archive" you can also find a range of projects with different focuses. A benefit of technology is that now many organizations can create their own Omeka site and build a collection to document events in real time. However, I hope the post above demonstrates that while anyone can, any historian utilizing these various resources need to consider the practices undertaken to gather digital archives. We would never enter a physical archive and look at paper documents without questioning why those survive, what's missing, and thinking about voices specifically left out. A digital collection is the same, however they present an abundance of sources that can distract or distort- approaching the surviving records of the Salem Witch Trials is different from approaching a collection of 40,000 personal accounts. What voices might not volunteer a personal account to a website if it requires identifying information? How many images of people in masks at the grocery store do we need to deliberately save? These are not substantially different questions from what past historians and archivists thought about, but technology does reframe discussion. We'll see how many of these projects were developed with sustainability in mind.
Historians are not working solely in the past, but we are also working on the present and keeping an eye on the future. We don't truly know if it will be a world of scarcity or abundance, but a lot of talented people in various disciplines and with diverse expertise are working on it. COVID is just offering the most recent example of this changing role and new challenges facing the historical profession.