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On Friday, January 5, 2024, MEAP convened a panel at the American Historical Association (AHA) Annual Meeting held in San Francisco. The session was part of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) held within the AHA meeting.
MEAP Board Member, Dr. Alejandra Bronfman, the current Vice President of CLAH, organized and chaired the session, bringing together MEAP project leads to discuss the challenges of leading MEAP projects in Latin America and the potential impact for making unique and endangered archival collections from the region accessible online. Todd Grappone, UCLA Library Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology, represented MEAP, offering insight into the UCLA Library's history of supporting digitization and our ongoing commitment to expanding access to global knowledge through open access.
The three MEAP Project Leads then introduced their projects:
- Alex Halkin, Americas Media Initiative | Visualizing Memory: Indigenous Resistance in Chiapas, Mexico (1998-2009)(opens in a new tab) [Planning Grant]
- Charles F. Walker, University of California, Davis | The Peruvian Peasant Confederation Archive: Rural and Indigenous Society, National Politics, and International Solidarity(opens in a new tab) [Project Grant]
- Meg Weeks, Harvard University and University of Florida | Historical Memory of Brazil’s National Federation of Domestic Workers [Planning Grant]
Each presentation highlighted the complexity of managing MEAP projects, which require collaboration across multiple teams and stakeholders. In particular, the presentations noted challenges in navigating administrative systems in multiple countries, training community members, ensuring technological expertise, and defining documentation practices. The discussion that followed these presentations also raised a number of successes that have come out of MEAP projects, such as locally held workshops that engaged communities and created local centers of knowledge and expertise.
A few key elements stood out from the conversation:
Building trust with archival holders and community members is essential for project success.
Infrastructures, including administrative and financial bureaucracies as well as technical infrastructures, are essential for project success. In particular, it's hard to establish the financial workflows that allow funds to be transferred to the project team. Additionally, financial policies may change over the course of a project.
Local conditions determine the project structure more than MEAP requirements. Project teams know best what kind of staff makeup is needed; procuring equipment can be challenging depending on the material of the collection and what hardware is available locally; and local conditions always define where the work of digitization can be done.
MEAP is an open access program, but communities define whether materials can be published online. Most project teams engage with local communities to determine which materials might not be appropriate for public access, like ID cards and other personal information. Planning Grants, in particular, might include a process for evaluation to determine what materials can be published online.
The UCLA Library is committed to long term support for the collections created through MEAP funding, which offers sustainability and protection against local political threats.
Thank you to the panel participants for their incredible work leading MEAP projects and for taking the time to share what they have learned with their scholarly community. And, thank you to Alejandra for putting together the panel and leading an incredible conversation. We look forward to more conversations like this, including conference panels, virtual symposia, and other opportunities for MEAP teams to connect.
