Building the Modern Endangered Archives Program

As we look ahead to 2024, MEAP is reflecting on our first five years of programmatic work. Since launching our first Call for Applications in 2018, we have funded 115 projects in 54 countries to document and digitize at risk cultural heritage. Our team of two - Rachel Deblinger (MEAP Director) and Savannah Dawson (Grants Assistant) – has grown to add Elizabeth Lhost, Program Manager. We have collaborated with partners at the UCLA Library as well as UCLA central units and established infrastructure that enables support for grantees around the world. Most importantly, we have honed practices that provide resources to scholars, librarians, archivists, community members, and students across the globe who work to preserve their own cultural heritage, expanding access to archival collections that have been left out of national archives, libraries, and historical narratives.

Building Infrastructure

MEAP has continued to grow through each grant round. We have created application forms, defined review criteria, refined subaward contracts, and navigated the UCLA payment systems – all in support of funding small, international institutions who have been safeguarding and stewarding archival collections for generations.

We have learned along the way, documenting our processes and collaborating with campus partners, library colleagues, and adapting materials from the Endangered Archives Program, which has been offering similar grants for over a decade. We asked questions, tried new methods, and have continued to iterate - launching new forms and documentation as we grow.

Amidst the day-to-day challenges to support each grantee and create structures that allow us to fund 20 - 30 projects each year, we have managed to build sustainable infrastructure that supports both the administrative aspects of our work and content creation around the world. While each project is unique, we have found that some questions and needs repeat and we have defined our expectations that allow our still small team to respond to each project one by one.

Expanding Archival Access

Like the rest of the world, the MEAP team shifted to a work-from-home environment in March 2020. We continued to meet project teams on Zoom - connecting with grantees, kitchen to kitchen or dining room to dining room. We supported project team delays, but adapted our workflows to host a virtual board meeting in May 2020 and launch a new Call for Applications in Fall 2020.

At the same time, some project teams pushed forward – digitizing in shifts for safety and creating metadata in distributed workspaces. By 2021, we had a new challenge to face: accepting data and defining a review-to-publish pipeline. New questions arose: What is the best method of receiving content? Would harddrives be lost via international shipping options? Could we manage cloud storage for all project teams? What would quality control look like? What were the technical requirements for different media types to ensure both publication and long term sustainability? How much data clean up could we manage while also supporting new cohorts of granted projects?

We were able to rely on the experience of our colleagues on the UCLA Digital Library team as well as the Audio Visual Preservation team, who have been leading digitization projects and supporting post-custodial collections for over a decade. We refined available resources and shared publicly a set of best practices that would enable online publication, but were also flexible enough to meet the unique needs and contexts of our project teams.

As always, we learned as we grew. Since 2021, the MEAP Team has crafted and published a set of new documentation, including an Application Handbook, a Grantee Handbook, and *just recently* a set of new metadata resources. The new Metadata Template and Metadata Handbook reflect updates to the UCLA Digital Library as well as our deeper understanding of MEAP projects.

As a result of our ever evolving workflows and the incredible commitment of MEAP grantees around the world, over 60,000 unique digital objects are now part of the MEAP Digital Collection. 32 collections from 22 different countries are now openly available for global access. The collection will continue to grow as MEAP projects continue their work – documenting and preserving unique cultural heritage materials.

Maintaining Our Purpose

In addition to establishing all of our infrastructures, we learned how important this work is to local communities and what it takes to maintain commitment and momentum. Looking through our past projects, we are proud to see how the MEAP community has grown. Project teams are building networks around MEAP projects, sharing knowledge and spreading the capacity for cultural heritage preservation beyond the grant team.

Our grantees have faced numerous challenges: local bureaucracies that delayed access to funding; physical and financial losses from the COVID-19 pandemic; political regimes that threaten archival displacement; illness; death and more. MEAP teams remained dedicated to preserving their histories. We recognize the importance of supporting that vision, learning how to navigate bureaucracies at multiple levels and thinking creatively to work around obstacles.

More, we have seen the impact of MEAP collections now that they are live. Students can find primary sources in local languages, instructors and researchers can rely on hard to access archival collections, and past grantees submit new applications to expand the work they have started. To help amplify the reach of these incredible collections, MEAP has launched a newsletter (sign up now!(opens in a new tab)) and begun to host events that allow conversations about digitization to reach new audiences.

After five years, we remain inspired to support our grantees and look forward to distributing new grants each year - expanding our network and growing the MEAP digital collection.