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Illuminating and Defining Collections
MEAP funds Planning Grants to support projects that organize and catalogue archival collections. Over the past five years, MEAP has funded 47 Planning Grants in 33 Countries(opens in a new tab), providing support for the initial phases of collection preservation. Planning Grant projects range in ambition: some aim to bring together disparate materials held by individuals to create a cohesive archival collection, others to create item level inventories of long held but disorganized materials, or to assess the physical status of material that has not been looked at in years. Still, other Planning Grants work extensively with community members to detail collection items, capturing community knowledge about a set of photographs, papers, or films, and secure permissions that will open up digitization possibilities in the future. This is to say that MEAP Planning Grants take different shapes and result in different kinds of reports, inventories, or surveys. All work to catalyze preservation for a set of archival materials that have not received the care and attention they require.
The resulting documents are consistently robust, accounting for archival collections in need of attention and preservation. More, MEAP has seen how Planning Grants spark conversations across communities and bring together collection holders with knowledge holders. While the projects take a variety of forms, the results regularly reveal networks of people related to the archival materials. Through events, workshops, training sessions, and ongoing conversations, MEAP Planning Grant holders build community around archival description. At the same time, the inventories, reports, surveys, and guides invite global understanding of these materials and serve as pathways for future digitization or preservation efforts.
Today, we are highlighting six completed MEAP Planning Grants to recognize the care that goes into these projects. Below you can see projects that create extensive collection reports, individual collection surveys, user guides, and item level inventories. In each case, the Planning Grant work documents a collection that had not previously been inventoried. While these efforts do not enable global access to the collections, consider how these reports open up use for researchers, safeguard collections from shifting political threats in the local region, and enable future digitization and open access publication.
Of the projects highlighted below, two have been funded for subsequent Project Grants, extending the life cycle of the project to include digitization and publication. Overall, MEAP has funded five Project Grants resulting from successful Planning Grants.
Visual Histories of Northeast India
Northeast India remains home to many indigenous communities and has been targeted by India's current political environment. This project surveyed photographs from Ahmed Hossain that depict the socio-cultural life of Northeast India's tribal communities between the 1960s-early 2000s. The team created 8 separate item level inventories, organizing the collection by state. The project team also wrote and published a detailed report focused on Hossain, the impact and meaning of his photographs, and the work of photography to document marginalized communities.
Read a report on their preliminary survey work in Lens Lores: Life in a Moment
Regional Documentary Film in Uruguay: The Carlos Alonso Collection
The "Alonso Collection," owned by the Archivo Nacional de la Imagen y la Palabra (SODRE), consists of forty-five rolls of nitrate film, shot in a documentary style throughout the countryside of Uruguay between 1920 and 1940. The materials, located in the vaults of Cinemateca Uruguaya (Uruguayan Cinematheque), have only been partially preserved and studied. The project team from Cine Casero have created a detailed inventory, technical assessment, and full collection report. This work prepares the film reels for future digitization.
The team also brought film stills to the Uruguayan countryside. Using an approach the team called “collective cataloging,” Felipe Belloq and his team showed film stills to local community members who helped identify people and places from this long lost footage. Community members were able to help catalog the film and watch the preserved footage together in their community.
The Archives of the Women’s Movement in Sudan, 1940-2010
Without an accessible archive of the women's movement in Sudan, women have remained almost invisible in the historiography of the country. The recent civilian revolution reminds us of their continuous presence in the Sudanese political and militant social life, which has yet to be documented. This project, led by the Center for Economic, Legal and Social Studies and Documentation (CEDEJ), in association with the French Institute of African Worlds (IMAF), the University of Bahri/Khartoum, and the National Archives of Khartoum, connected with 6 activists and 3 organizations to survey privately held collections.
The project team estimates that of these 9 collections, at least one has been lost due to ongoing violence in the country. All 9 surveys are now available online, in Arabic with some English description.
Playing Relative: Alliance-Making in Urban Malaysia
The project team worked on three collections as part of this grant: the photomedia artist Yee I-Lann’s collection of print material, photographs and film negatives; performance artist and educator Ray Lagenbach’s collection of video, news clippings; and writer and photographer Bernice Chauly’s collection of photographs.
Through this work, the team uncovered a whole series of materials from the 1990s and 2000s that trace alliance making practices in cultural practices in Malaysia. The happenings, art events and projects that characterized these two decades of counterculture practice crossed the boundaries of racial, language and genre communities and occurred across multiple Malaysian cities, a coming together rarely witnessed in Malaysia’s contemporary climate of racial politics.
Explore the surveys and inventories for each artist
Building Memory in Casablanca
The Building Department archives of the city of Casablanca hold thousands of architectural drawings, plans and correspondence related to projects designed between 1917 and 1980. Precise in detail yet wide-ranging in media and scope, the archives document a critical period in the history of Casablanca, as well as the development of modern architecture in Morocco. This project has surveyed and organized the Building Department archives and created User Guides in Arabic, French, and English that allow researchers to better access the collection before it is digitized. Their work has realigned the collection material, organizing by location and architect.
Read the User Guide Book in Arabic, French and English
The Biobio Legacy: Mapuche-Pehuenche Organizing and Resistance in Chile
The NGO, Camino de Tierra in Chile conducted a survey of the photographic and audio material, as well as some original print documents and non-edited video materials, from the local and national struggle against the construction of hydroelectric dams in Chile's historic Biobío river. Materials include black and white and color photographs of meetings and protests, audio of a bilingual radio program and original documents of Mapuche-Pehuenche organizations. The success of this Planning Grant led to a Project Grant currently under way.
Explore all MEAP Planning Grants(opens in a new tab) now.