The 43-year-old raised his camera and took a photograph. Later, it would become one of the images Uwakwe used to create paintings inspired by the pandemic. “To see maybe six people there, everyone wearing a mask,” he said, “it brought everything together.”

Around the world, people like Uwakwe are creating photographs, paintings, emails, journals and social media posts that will shape how the world remembers the coronavirus pandemic for years and centuries to come. Museums and historical societies already are collecting materials, often with help from people accustomed to capturing and sharing even the most mundane moments around them.

The result, historians say, will be a collective memory more personal than perhaps any other moment in history.

“Everyone is touched by this. Everyone has a story,” said Erika Holst, curator of history at the Illinois State Museum, one of hundreds across the U.S. gathering pieces of a generational treasure trove. Collecting the items in real time allows historians to nudge people for the stories behind them — a luxury rarely available, Holst said. “Usually as historians, we get a lot of numbers — the number of people who died, the number who got sick, the economic effect,” she said. “It doesn’t always capture what it felt like.”

The enormity of the event is forcing historians to balance capturing ephemeral moments and those that will transcend time. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, a task force is looking into how to gather and preserve objects, images and documents that could become part of permanent collections. But the pandemic itself is challenging the group’s ability to collect because the museum is closed, so curators are asking potential donors to hold onto items.

“We are trying to take the long view on this, so (we are) focusing now most on objects that are ephemeral, things that might disappear, that might get thrown away or just used up,” said Benjamin Filene, the museum’s associate director of curatorial affairs.

Unlike during other national crises, people have a camera in their pocket at all times, documenting whatever they deem relevant and sharing it on social media, from the cloth mask they sew and the sour-dough bread they baked to the cheer for front-line workers and the Zoom meeting of school students.

But not every quilt made or puzzle finished can tell the story of what happened in the U.S. in the spring of 2020.

“There is sort of this overwhelming mass of information, but that information is not necessarily being captured in a way that’s going to be preserved,” Filene said. “And there’s also the possibility that it is so fragmentary that how much will it translate to somebody else five years from now or 25 or 50 years from now? We don’t just need a thing; we want the story that goes with the thing.”

Technology is helping historians collect material and tell stories as well. The Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and publishing house, is using technology known as a “spider” to crawl the web and collect information about how the pandemic is affecting the hard-hit city. Among its finds: the city’s cellphone alert system’s webpage.