Endangered Archives Programme

Aquiles Alencar-Brayner

Aquiles.alencarbrayner@bl.uk

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General Objective

Digitalization and Open Access

Foster collaboration between national libraries, research institutions, NGOs and national governments for the preservation, digitisation, virtual reunification and open access to important collections.

Examples:

Codex Sinaiticus: http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/

Europeana: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/

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Endangerd Archives Programme (EAP)

Sponsor: Arcadia http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk/content/

Mission: contribute to the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide.

Scope: The specific focus of this programme is upon archives relating to the pre-industrial stages of a society's development, whether in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or even Europe.

Recuperation/digitisation of archives in Latin America: £ 505.000,00

Projects in Latin America and Caribbean: http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/americas.html

Chile: Identification of the potential corpus for a Mapuche special historical collectionBolivia:

Digitisation of Bolivian indigenous communities records on ayllu structure, tax and land tenure

Brazil: Pilot project to seek, identify, contact and report on collections of the endangered archives of the states of Maranhão and Pará in the Amazon region of Brazil

Peru: Locating audiovisual ethnographic collections of expressive Andean culture in Peru

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How does it work?

Team:

►1 Curator

► 1 Administrator

► 1 Cataloguer

► International advisory panel formed by 8 members: 6 academics and archivists from different research areas, 1 principal adviser (Arcadia) and 1 BL staff: http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/panel.html

Grants:

Applications will take place in September 2011, with a deadline of the beginning of November for submission of preliminary applications. There are 2 types of grant offered by EAP:

1. Pilot Project: – projects to investigate the survival of archival collections in any specific format, and the

feasibility of their recovery. (Up to £ 10,000.00)

2. Major Project:– individual researchers may apply for grants to locate relevant collections, to arrange their

transfer to a suitable local archival home where possible, and to deliver copies to the British Library and a local institution for the benefit of researchers worldwide. (Up to 50,000.00)

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EAP: Objectives and proposal

1. Enhance local capabilities.

2. The original archival material will not leave the country of origin except in exceptional cases when it is required to do so temporarily for specific conservation or copying purposes.

3. Equipment funded by the Programme will remain in the country of the project at the end of the grant for future use.

4. The grants are normally administered by host institutions.

5. Both microfilming and digitisation are accepted as modes of copying under the Programme.

6. Copyright in the material will remain with the copyright holder.

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EAF: future directions

Open access to digitised material (initial phase):

EAP files accessible from BL Webpage http://eap.bl.uk/ but mot cross searchable at the moment. Files will be integrated into the new MSS online catalogue http://searcharchives.bl.uk

Problems:

Limited storage space: 2TB. At the moment we have at least 50TB of data.