Archives West Finding Aid

The 2016 U.S. presidential election included the first major party female presidential nominee, former U.S. First Lady, democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, and billionaire U.S. businessman and self-proclaimed Washington outsider, republican Donald J. Trump. The election cycle was especially divisive. The election exposed the depths of a political divide for much of the country and the world.

The election was held on Tuesday, 8 November 2016, and Donald J. Trump was the victor. As the election results began to come in across news and social media outlets, social media “blew up” with personal reflections on the election results. Randy Williams, Fife Folklore Archives Curator in USU Special Collections, thought it important to collect these reflections. Colleagues Jennifer Duncan, department head of Special Collection & Archives, and Liz Woolcott, department head of Cataloging and Metadata Services, agreed. The three worked speedily with many colleagues throughout the USU Library to produce the project and gather reflections.

The social media collecting project was a first for the USU Library. And, the collection organization happened in five hours! From noon until 5pm, 9 November, the key team worked to create a Qualtrics survey to solicit responses, submit and received Utah State University Institutional Review Board approval, create an information website, write a press release, and launch the social media collecting project through social media.

The project launched at approximately 5:15pm and ran from 9 November until 9 December 2016. Contributors to the project were able to do so in under 20 minutes and all online. The first respondent was at 5:46 pm that same day: 31 minutes after the launch. Survey respondents were asked to share their thoughts on the election and had the option to provide additional information about themselves. The information provided in the survey helped the team organize the collection. This information will allow users to see how reactions varied in different locations, between men and women, political parties, etc.

The collection produced 233 reflections. The respondents are from 27 U.S. states and two foreign countries. Although the project received responses from around the world, the Library collected the reflections as a part of its mission to gather the voices and perspectives of members of Northern Utah communities. SCA hopes to do this for coming presidential elections, and possibly state elections. Future researchers seeking to understand the diversity of the political culture of Utah will require more than vote counts. Like tiles in a mosaic, each voice adds shape and dimension to our local, state, and national identity.