In its third year, the Modern Endangered Archives Program has also launched an open access website
The Modern Endangered Archives Program, a granting initiative launched in 2018 by the UCLA Library with support from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, has funded 29 new projects that will preserve at-risk materials as diverse as audio recordings of indigenous languages in Siberia, film periodicals from Pakistan and India, and photographs and maps from Peruvian Amazonia.
The program will also make the materials publicly available for researchers around the world.
These newly funded projects represent the program’s third cohort and will nearly double the scope of its work, bringing the MEAP’s total roster to 66 documentation and digitization projects in 34 countries.
“Despite a global pandemic and the threat of climate change to cultural heritage, the UCLA Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program continues to make steady progress working with our international partners to digitize at-risk collections and to publish them online,” said Ginny Steel, the Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian. “This crucial work aligns with the UCLA Library’s mission to make diverse collections and resources available to current and future generations of faculty, students and international scholars.”
This year’s projects will augment earlier collections that document human rights activism, political movements and indigeneity across regional boundaries and expand the scope of MEAP by preserving collections related to film censorship, fine art, radio broadcasting in Africa and cultural production (i.e. newspapers, posters and newsletters) in endangered languages.
