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MEAP in Peru: Exploring Workflows, Teamwork, Access, and Ownership
On Monday, October 21, 2024 MEAP project leads Sydney Silverstein, Amanda Smith, and Eva Willems joined MEAP Program Director, Rachel Deblinger, to discuss cultural heritage digitization in Peru. The panel discussed the value of digitization for at risk cultural heritage as well as the challenges of working outside Lima to ensure that historical documents that reflect life outside the central metropolis are also safeguarded and accessible.
Willems discussed the Planning Grant she led, Memories from No-Man's Land: Archives of the Peruvian Self-Defense Militias, which organized and documented the collection of the Archivo de la Sede Central del Comité de Autodefensa del Valle Apurímac-Ene. The project ensured that a larger network of peasant self-defense committees established by the rural population during the internal armed conflict between the Maoist rebel group Shining Path and the state forces (1980-2000) is now cataloged and accounted for. The collection includes many sensitive materials that could not yet be shared openly online, which is one reason a Planning Grant was the right step for this work.
Silverstein and Smith led The Biblioteca Amazónica: History and Politics Between the Forest and City and discussed their commitment to the work, which has led to a second digitization grant funded by the Endangered Archives Programme. The project to digitize materials held by the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru has resulted in thousands of now accessible journals, photographs, and other materials that reflect not only life in Iquitos, but global links that have connected Iquitos with the world since the early-mid 20th Century.
In both of these cases, the collections were stewarded by local community leaders who defined priorities for documenting their own communities. This was true of the peasant communities in Ayacucho and of Father Joaquin Garcia at the Apostolic Vicariate of Iquitos who collected a variety of materials and created the local newsletter, Kanatari: News weekly (1984 - 2016). To ensure that both collections were documented with community knowledge, work took place on site with local project teams developing new skills to complete description and digitization.
Fostering Communities of Knowledge Holders
Both projects were executed by teams of students and young people hired to organize, catalogue, digitize, edit, and describe these collections and all three panelists noted that the success of their projects was not only in the preservation of these collections, but in the teams built through this work.
Silverstein noted that she was "most proud of the young people who now know a lot about archives and digital archiving." These skills have been recognized locally and beyond with the project team now completing a second internationally funded digitization project and developing training opportunities for others in the region. Smith added that all applicants should consider not only the collection they want to preserve, but whether they are willing to serve as mentors and put the time into training.
For Willems too, it was important to embed the project in the local community. Willems repeated that the history of peasant self-defense movements was not her history and she worked with local community members to document the collection and to set the parameters for sensitivity and privacy. She sought to create "a collaborative process that was sensitive to whose voices were preserved in the collection." To help meet this ambition, the project team created all documentation in English, Spanish and Quechua(opens in a new tab).
Beyond the collection and access to this material, what are the social implications for this work? What do you want to leave behind when the grant is completed?
Navigating Workplans and Administrative Challenges
The panel also addressed the challenges of executing a Modern Endangered Archives Program grant and encouraged the audience of potential applicants to consider administrative details in the application phase. In particular, they called attention to the following project details:
- What kind of payment structure works for your project team? Will you pay per month, per batch or set of deliverables?
- How do funds get transferred between countries and where might there be unanticipated transfer costs?
- How difficult is it to procure equipment in different parts of the world?
- What kind of legal and privacy rights need to be addressed?
- What kind of software will be needed to edit digital files and to manage the project?
- How will the team prioritize large collections?
While some of these challenges need to be negotiated with banks and institutions, some of them can be addressed through careful planning and through building relationships of trust with the project team. Recognizing the different kinds of knowledge needed to successfully complete any MEAP project is key.
