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What is the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP)?
Established in 2019, the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) provides funding to researchers, archivists, organisations, or custodians of cultural heritage who apply to create an inventory for digitisation (planning grant) or to digitise and publicise visual, audio, or textual collections (project grant). Funded by the charitable foundation Arcadia, MEAP is similar to the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (EAP). While EAP focuses on collections from before 1900, MEAP targets documents created in the 20th and 21st centuries.
MEAP primarily operates in regions lacking adequate resources to preserve archives. It specifically focuses on archives of small organisations, groups, or minorities (whether religious, community, sexual, economic, political, etc.) that cannot afford to digitise their own records. The programme aims to move beyond nationalist narratives found in some official documents by incorporating the archives of groups advocating for equality and justice. It is quite obvious that these archives may contain significant biases but they also bring a new perspective on the past. Having access to these voices is therefore essential.
Whoever teaches a dissertation module or is looking for teaching material online will be interested in the collections already available.
Teaching and Research Potential
Whoever teaches a dissertation module or is looking for teaching material online will be interested in the collections already available. For example, I teach a Year 3 module on the history of Nigeria and I have used material kept by the first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe to understand the history of the country in the 1950s and 1960s. Some audiovisual material digitised by the team of Ayo Adeduntan, at the University of Ibadan also shows great promise and I will certainly use it next year (see these two blog posts here and here about MEAP in the classroom as well).
As you can see here, MEAP works all over the world and specialists of different geographic areas will be delighted to find material on human rights in Argentina, visual histories of North-East India as well as printed periodicals in Dari-Farsi, Pashto, and Turki languages from all over Afghanistan. Scholars of social movements, environment, religion, will also be able to find new teaching and research material.
Decolonising the curriculum is not always easy. MEAP gives an opportunity for us to rethink about our teaching and research in a rather affordable way since we only need to pay for an Internet connection to access the material free online. Let’s see what AI can uncover from the vast amounts of data now accessible online. I have strong reasons to believe that the potential for this type of initiative is enormous.