Over £400K in Grants Helps Preserve Endangered Archives
Researchers throughout the world will benefit greatly from the Endangered Archives Programme, which in 2006 awarded grants of over £470,000 through sponsorship by the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund. This second round of funding by the Programme will cover 19 projects, preserving photographic archives, Islamic manuscripts, endangered musical collections and endangered court records from Africa, Asia, Russia, Latin America and Europe.
The major research projects will take between one to two years to complete and those that have been given funding are as follows:
- Digitising Islamic manuscripts of Indonesian Pondok Pesantren
- Reconstruction of sound materials of endangered languages in the Russian Federation for sound archives in St Petersburg
- Preservation of historic and rare Nepali monographs and periodicals
- Collecting and preserving the records of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania in Moshi, Tanzania
- The Golha radio programmes (Flowers of Persian Song and Poetry)
- Tuvalu National Archives major project
- Voiceless choirs. Serbian musical collections from Zemun in 19th and early 20th centuries
- The digital documentation of manuscripts of Drametse and Ogyen Choling
- Endangered ethnographic archive, Sofia, Bulgaria
- Preservation and digitisation of Yi archives in public and private collections in Yunnan, China
- Archiving a Cameroonian photographic studio
Eight further pilot projects have been awarded smaller grants, covering a range of material from the archiving of Buddhist photographs in Laos to a survey of endangered court records of Nevis, West Indies.
Director of Scholarship and Collections at the British Library, Dr Clive Field, said: "We are delighted that the Endangered Archives Programme is able to offer a second round of funding through the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund to such a diverse set of projects which will aid researchers worldwide. Preserving the world's documentary heritage is an enormous task, but the Endangered Archives Programme is making an excellent contribution. "
Professor Barry Supple, Chairman of the International Advisory Panel and academic adviser to the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund commented: "The Endangered Archives Programme is one element in the Fund's growing commitment to the preservation and dissemination of human, cultural and social knowledge. It is an integral contribution to a vital historical task"
Grant application procedures and further information on the Programme are available on the British Library's website at www.bl.uk/endangeredarchives. The closing date for the next round of applications is 3 November 2006.
For further information, contact Anne Marie Todaro at the British Library Press Office: 020 7412 7112 or annemarie.todaro@bl.uk
Notes for Editors
- Professor Barry Supple and Graham Shaw, Head of Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections are both available for interview. They are both members of the advisory board.
- 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 news papers. 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
- 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
Principal investigator: Mr Amiq Ahyad
Host institution: LPAM, Indonesia
Title of project: The MIPES Indonesia: digitising Islamic manuscripts of Indonesian Pondok Pesantren
Location of archival material: Indonesia
Award: £41,373
Duration: 9 months
Principal investigator: Dr Tjeerd de Graaf
Host institution: Isaac Massa Foundation, the Netherlands
Title of project: Reconstruction of sound materials of endangered languages in the Russian Federation for sound archives in St Petersburg
Location of archival material: Russian Federation
Award: £50,119
Duration: 24 months
Principal investigator: Mr Kanak Mani Dixit
Host institution: Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya , Nepal
Title of project: Preservation of historic and rare Nepali monographs and periodicals
Location of archival material: Nepal
Award: £49,832
Duration: 12 months
Principal investigator: Professor Adam Jones
Host institution: Leipzig University
Title of project: Collecting and preserving the records of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania in Moshi, Tanzania
Location of archival material: Tanzania
Award: £27,500
Duration: 12 months
Principal investigator: Mrs Jane Lewisohn
Host institution: SOAS, University of London
Title of project: The Golha radio programmes (Flowers of Persian Song and Poetry)
Location of archival material: Iran
Award: £59,913
Duration: 14 months
Principal investigator: Mr Richard Overy
Host institution: Australian National University
Title of project: Tuvalu National Archives major project
Location of archival material: Pacific Islands of Tuvalu
Award: £29,130
Duration: 21 months
Principal investigator: Dr Ivana Perkovic Radak
Host institution: University of Arts, Belgrade
Title of project: Voiceless choirs. Serbian musical collections from Zemun in 19th and early 20th centuries
Location of archival material: Serbia and Montenegro
Award: £10,810
Duration: 6 months
Principal investigator: Dr Karma Phuntsho
Host institution: Aris Trust Centre for Tibetan and Himalayan Studies, Oxford University
Title of project: The digital documentation of manuscripts at Drametse and Ogyen Choling
Location of archival material: Bhutan
Award: £45,930
Duration: 10 months
Principal investigator: Professor Rachko Popov
Host institution: Ethnographic Institute and Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Title of project: Endangered ethnographic archive, Sofia, Bulgaria
Location of archival material: Bulgaria
Award: £15,086
Duration: 5 months
Principal investigator: Dr Jian Xu
Host institution: Sun Yat-sen University
Title of project: Preservation and digitisation of Yi archives in public and private collections in Yunnan, China
Location of archival material: China
Award: £41,100
Duration: 12 months
Principal investigator: Dr David Zeitlyn
Host institution: University of Kent
Title of project: Archiving a Cameroonian photographic studio
Location of archival material: Cameroon
Award: £36,838
Duration: 15 months
Pilot Projects
Principal investigator: Mr Hans Berger
Host institution: Independent Researcher
Title of project: Archive of Buddhist photographs in Luang Prabang, Laos
Location of archival material: Laos
Award: £13,475
Duration: 10 months
Principal investigator: Professor Anuradha Chanda
Host institution: Jadavpur University, India
Title of project: Archiving texts in the Sylhet Nagri script
Location of archival material: India
Award: £10,000
Duration: 12 months
Principal investigator: Mr Oscar Grandio Moraguez
Host institution: York University, Canada
Title of project: Pilot project to identify endangered African diaspora collections at the major archives of the province of Matanzas, Cuba
Location of archival material: Cuba
Award: £10,953
Duration: 11 months
Principal investigator: Professor Rezo Khutsishvili
Host institution: Department of State Archives and Records Management of Georgia
Title of project: Digitising the photo documents of Georgia 's central state audio-visual archive
Location of archival material: Georgia
Award: £1,640
Duration: 3 months
Principal investigator: Mr Samuel Njovana
Host institution: Independent Researcher
Title of project: Locating, listing and protecting the archives of Independent (or African Instituted) Churches in Zimbabwe
Location of archival material: Zimbabwe
Award: £10,660
Duration: 4 months
Principal investigator: Dr Irina Podgorny
Host institution: Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina
Title of project: 'Faces drawn in the sand': a rescue pilot project of Native peoples' photographs stored at the Museum of La Plata, Argentina
Location of archival material: Argentina
Award: £9,700
Duration: 9 months
Principal investigator: Dr Mohammed Salau
Host institution: York University, Canada
Title of project: Northern Nigeria: precolonial documents preservation scheme
Location of archival material: Nigeria
Award: £10,191
Duration: 12 months
Principal investigator: Mr David Small
Host institution: University of Bristol
Title of project: A survey of the endangered court records of Nevis, West Indies
Location of archival material: Saint Kitts and Nevis
Award: £5,446
Duration: 1 month