Yet, the work of creating these digital collections often remains obscured. Who is making the choices about what gets digitized, how it gets described, and what is accessible? What kinds of technical ethical, cultural, legal, and financial considerations impact how archives get digitized and what historians are able to access online?
This poster highlights the work of the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) at the UCLA Library to support the documentation and digitization of endangered cultural heritage materials around the world as a case study for understanding how digital collections are created. In its first six years, MEAP has funded 138 projects to preserve archives in 58 different countries. To date, MEAP has published nearly 100,000 unique archival materials, including film, video, audio, photographs, newspapers, ephemera, and manuscripts. MEAP collections ensure access for research and teaching purposes, inviting scholars and community members to engage directly with primary sources from communities who have historically been left out of national and historical discourse.
This poster will center MEAP’s guiding principles: post-custodial collecting; community led description; and open access publishing. Guided by these values, MEAP provides project documentation, including templates, workflows, and best practices that enable project teams around the world to determine their own archival priorities and descriptive practices in partnership with our team at the UCLA Library. As a result, MEAP funds the creation of collections that preserve local context and amplify global voices, often reinscribing historical materials with robust description to reflect community experiences. The poster will visualize this workflow, making transparent processes that are often unseen.
By highlighting the methods of digitization and collection creation, we invite poster viewers to consider how digital collections are created, what informs decisions about description and access, and where there are gaps in online access. At the same time, our participation in this poster session will introduce historians to the breadth of MEAP projects and new opportunities for both research and teaching. MEAP publishes sample lesson plans and how-tos for digital tools that can support the integration of primary source exercises. We welcome the opportunity to engage directly with the diverse audiences of AHA about digital collections and teaching with online primary sources. We also hope our poster can inspire AHA members to apply for future rounds of funding.