The Together/Apart North San Diego COVID-19 Community Memory Archive was created by the University Library, California State University San Marcos, in response to the arrival of the COVID-19 disease in California and its related societal impacts beginning in March of 2020. The collection is a participatory archive that utilized community participation from individuals that lived, worked, or studied in North San Diego County and Southern Riverside County in 2020-2022. Contributors had the option to contribute anonymously; in such cases, their identities have been redacted and their information not kept. Submissions to Together/Apart totaled 606 digital files submitted by San Diego County residents and California State University students, staff, and faculty, and also contains 3 linear feet of physical materials.

Materials submitted to the archive came from community members within CSUSM's service area as well as students, staff, faculty, and administrators at the university. Materials were submitted in a variety of formats including PDF, Doc, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, MP3, and MP4. In some instances, formats of materials have been normalized for future digital preservation and access. Physical items largely are ephemera or documents related to the pandemic in some way, such as newspaper clippings or health fliers.

Broadly speaking, recurring themes in the collection include exploration of emotional states such as isolation, depression, and resilience. Students often speak of the change of shifting to an entirely online educational experience in 2020. Contributors also often speak to shutdown and quarantine, the health of themselves and family members, contraction of COVID-19, sickness and death of family and friends, and working during the pandemic (or conversely, not working due to the pandemic). Less common themes also include racism, politics, Black Lives Matter, moving back home, and the beginnings or endings of romantic and platonic relationships. Images submitted are mostly documentary photography, with some creative works as well. Video files tend to be creative/interpretive in nature, while the audio files, which all originated from a class doing podcasts, tend to be focused on documenting lived experience around some specific topic.