Archive treasures to be saved
16 August 2005 :: Posted by Catriona Finlayson
First grants from Endangered Archives Programme
Medieval manuscripts, texts, photographs, official records, audio tapes, music, rare indigenous scripts, suppressed and neglected transcripts from Africa, Asia, Russia, South America and Europe will all be preserved and digital copies made available to researchers in the British Library following the first awards from the Endangered Archives Programme sponsored by the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund. Grants totalling more than £600,000 have been awarded to twenty projects around the world.
The major research projects which will take between one to two years to complete and which have been given initial funding are as follows:
- Digitising the photographic archive of Southern Siberian indigenous peoples
- Survey, conservation and archiving of pre-1947 Telugu printed materials and paintings in India
- Folk theatre tales: preserving images, sounds and voices of rural Tuscany
- The treasures of Danzan Ravjaa, Mongolian Buddhist manuscripts
- Endangered Urdu periodicals: preservation and access for vulnerable scholarly resources
- Digital documentation of manuscript collection in Gangtey, Bhutan
- Locating audiovisual ethnographic collections of expressive Andean culture in Peru
- Rescuing Liberian History: preserving the personal papers of William VS Tubman, Liberia's longest serving President'
- Securing of the medieval and early modern archival material (14th to 17th c.) of Brasov/Kronstadt and the Burzenland region (central Romania)
- First Yap State Constitutional Convention audio tapes conversion project
- Bamum script and archives project: saving Africa's written heritage, Cameroon
- Salvage and preservation of dongjing archives in Yunnan, China : transcript, score, ritual and performance
- Preserving East Timor's endangered archives.
Seven further pilot projects have been awarded smaller grants, covering a range of material from 19th century Iranian photographs to fragments of the Mapuche people of Araucania who were colonised by Chile and Argentina.
Director of Scholarship and Collections at the British Library, Dr Clive Field, said: "We received applications to the Endangered Archives Programme from around the globe. The depth and range of archives that we have already assisted shows that there is much further work to be done. As well as benefitting the country of origin, the scheme also allows us to make them accessible to researchers in the UK."
The Academic Adviser to the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund, spokesperson, Professor Barry Supple commented: "It is enormously gratifyng that this initiative has had such a successful and promising beginning. The Trustees of the Fund wish to make a significant contribution to the preservation of the world's culture and hisorical knowledge. And the advisory panel have made an excellent start in what is a unique voyage."
Application procedures and forms for grants or further information on the Programme and application procedures are available on the British Library's web-site at www.bl.uk/endangeredarchives and the closing date for the next round of applications is 11 November 2005.
For more information please contact: Catriona Finlayson, Press office +44 (0)207 412 7115 or email catriona.finlayson@bl.uk
Notes for editors
1. Professor Barry Supple and Graham Shaw, Head of Asia and Pacific Manuscripts are both available for interview. They are both members of the advisory board.
2. The British Library houses the world's knowledge, and with over 150 million separate items it is one of the top three libraries in the world. It is the UK's national library and the world's leading resource for scholarship, research and innovation. Its collection covers every age of written civilisation, every written language and every aspect of human thought. Material held by the Library ranges from ancient Chinese oracle bones to technical reports about the latest scientific discoveries and today's newspapers. Users including industrial companies and academic scholars, have access to the Library's collection in its Reading Rooms and via its global document supply services, which supply over 15,000 documents per day to 20,000 customers in 111 countries. Information on the Library's collection and services is available on the British Library website at www.bl.uk
3. The Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund is a grant-making charity, established in 2001. The Trustees are entitled to apply the funds to any charitable purpose in the UK or abroad, in their own order of priority. Their present policy is to make a few but large grants, and to support activities of high scholarly, cultural, or social worth. So far, they have made grants involving total commitments over ten years of some forty-six million pounds sterling (about sixty-six million Euros, or eighty-nine million US dollars).
Main research grants:
Dr David Anderson, University of Aberdeen
"Digitising the photographic archive of Southern Siberian indigenous peoples"
Southern Siberia, Russia, £42,075, 18 months
Professor Murali Atlury, Sundarayya Vigna Kendram, India
"Survey, conservation and archiving of pre-1947 Telugu printed materials and paintings in India" Andhra Pradesh, India
£34,468, 12 months
Professor Pietro Clemente, University of Florence
"Folk theatre tales: preserving images, sounds and voices of rural Tuscany"
£40,000, 12 months
Professor Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge
"The treasures of Danzan Ravjaa" Mongolia
£38,880, 24 months
Mr Adnan Malik, Cornell University
"Endangered Urdu periodicals: preservation and access for vulnerable scholarly resources" Uttar Pradesh, India
£2,650 (initial funding) 1 month
Dr Karma Phuntsho, Aris Trust Centre, University of Oxford
"Digital documentation of manuscript collection in Gangtey" Bhutan
£48,000, 12 months
Dr Verlon Stone, Indiana University
'Rescuing Liberian History: preserving the personal papers of William VS Tubman, Liberia's longest serving President'
Liberia, £48,810 16 months
Dr Geoffrey Robinson University of California, Los Angeles
"Preserving East Timor's endangered archives"
East Timor £45,505 12 months
Dr Raul Romero Catholic University of Peru
"Locating audiovisual ethnographic collections of expressive Andean culture in Peru"
£41,829 12 months
Mr Thomas Sindilariu University of Heidelberg
"Securing of the medieval and early modern archival material (14th to 17th c.) of Brasov/Kronstadt and the Burzenland region (central Romania)"
£29,921 13 months
Ms Cheryl Stanborough, Yap State Archives
"First Yap State Constitutional Convention audio tapes conversion project"
£20,511 24 months
Dr Konrad Tuchscherer, St John's University, New York
"Bamum script and archives project: saving Africa's written heritage"
Cameroon £54,800 15 months
Dr Jian Xu, Sun Yat-sen University
"Salvage and preservation of dongjing archives in Yunnan, China : transcript, score, ritual and performance"
Yunnan , China £46,530 18 months
Pilot projects
Dr Alexandru Balesescu , Royal University for Women, Kingdom of Bahrain
"Faces and places in Iran. Iranian photography at the turn of the 19th century"
Dr Patrick Darling, Independent researcher,
"Making Professor Ade Obayemi's life work available to the world", Nigeria
Professor Anne Feldhaus, Arizona State University
Preserving Marathi manuscripts and making them accessible, Maharashtra State, India
Dr Rolf Foerster, University of Chile
"Identification of the potential corpus for a Mapuche special historical collection", Brazil
Mr Carlos Liberato de Sousa, York University, Canada
"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"
Mr Richard Overy, Australian National University
Tuvalu National Archives preservation pilot project, Pacific Islands of Tuvalu
Dr Verlon Stone, Indiana University
Rescuing Liberian history: a pilot study to preserve and enable access to Liberia's Persidential and National Archives