Doodle for Posterity

     When this pandemic is long past, and historians try to discover how it felt for the ordinary citizen, they won't just turn to presidential proclamations or infection statistics -- no, they'll seek out diaries, blogs, handwritten letters, scrapbooks and such. One suspects that future chroniclers will find a treasure trove of primary source material at the Brooklyn Art Library.

     The BAL is home to the Sketchbook Project, a crowd-funded "museum and community space." It works like this:

     1. You order a blank sketchbook from the project.
     2. You fill the sketchbook with whatever words/images you like. (The BAL often provides prompts, just in case you need a place to get started.)
     3. You send it back to the Brooklyn Art Library.
     4. It becomes part of the library's collection, so people can request it off the shelf or (if you paid an extra fee) see it online.

a package full of potential

      Museums don't really get a lot more democratic than this. If you need something to fill the time while waiting for the museums to re-open, here's a chance to express yourself and tell 22nd-century cyber-historians what 2020 was really like.