From Communities to Collections: The Modern Endangered Archives Program in South Asia and Beyond

This presentation introduces UCLA Library's Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP), detailing its community-driven framework for preserving endangered cultural heritage, with a focus on South Asian projects and the application process.

Since 2019, the Modern Endangered Archives Program at the University of California, Los Angeles Library has been providing grants to cultural heritage organizations around the world to document and digitize their collections. These collections include newspapers and magazines, ephemera, audio and video recordings, photographs, and personal papers that are critically endangered due to inherently unstable media, improper storage, climate and environmental factors, and cultural change. To date, MEAP has funded 171 projects in 64 countries across seven rounds of funding, resulting in the completion of 41 collection survey projects and the digitization of more than 110,000 digital objects. Over the years, MEAP has developed resources and approaches to support these projects, enabling communities, creators, and collection custodians to take the lead in documenting and digitizing their collections. This talk will introduce MEAP, describe the types of projects we fund, and explain our approaches to community driven and inclusive description. The presentation will conclude with an overview of the projects and collections we’ve supported from South Asia and an opportunity to ask questions about the MEAP application process.

Speaker

Dr Elizabeth Lhost is a historian of modern South Asia and the author of Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia (University of North Carolina Press 2022), which won the 2023 Karwaan Book Prize. Her research and writing have been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is currently Program Manager for the Modern Endangered Archives Program at the University of California, Los Angeles Library where she works to safeguard and preserve cultural heritage materials from around the world.

Photo credit: MEAP Nagaraja Rao Collection