 Hello everyone and welcome to a special guest webinar hosted by Claire's Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research and Original Sources focused on the British Library's Endangered Archives Program, or the EAP. The EAP funds the digitization of archives around the world in danger of destruction, neglect, or deterioration. The initiative has provided grants to more than 370 projects in 90 countries worldwide in over 100 languages and scripts. It's an incredible opportunity for scholars to work with and give back to the archives that support their research. Because so many of our fellows have worked in Endangered Archives and in some cases have found themselves assisting the archivist with preservation, we thought that this program would be of particular interest to our alumni community. My name is Nicole Ferriolo, Director of Global Strategic Initiatives at CLEAR, and I'll be moderating the session today. Our special guest is Jodi Buttersworth, Curator of the Endangered Archives Program and we're also joined by my colleague Lizzie Albert, who will be offering support for this webinar. Hello, happy to be here. So just some quick housekeeping regarding the Zoom platform we'll be using today. If a chat box isn't already displaying on your Zoom screen, you can hover your mouse towards the bottom of the screen and open it manually. Feel free to introduce yourself in this space. If you would like to send a message to everyone, just change the default from all panelists to all panelists and attendees. We'll be using the Q&A box for questions today, and you can open the, which you can open the same way as the chat box. Use the Q&A box to submit questions anytime throughout this webinar. Note that Zoom should also allow you to promote questions. So if you see a question from someone else that also interests you, click the button. We'll be monitoring on our end to combine like questions and answer all unanswered questions at the end of the session. As a reminder, this session is being recorded and will be made available to fellows and alumni for future viewing. And now I'm going to hand it over to Jodi, who will start our presentation. Lovely, thanks very much indeed. Right, I'm going to switch off my video, if that's all right, so that I can look at my notes and I don't have my head bowed the whole time. Though I realize the controls haven't been handed over to me just yet for the screen. Oh, it's worked already. Lovely. So the figures that have just been sent to introduce this hasn't, aren't quite right anymore. We now say that we have funded just over 400 projects in 90 countries, so it's still 90 countries. But I should sort of explain EAP a bit more. We try and preserve cultural heritage and make it available to as wide an audience as possible. And hopefully my talk will cover both aspects of that. I will talk about what we do to try and preserve the heritage and then what we also do to make it available. EAP was set up in 2004. We've been going for quite some time now. And we were set up by a very generous grant through Arcadia, which is a charitable trust of Lisbeth Rowsing and Peter Baldwin. And last year we had the fund renewed, so we are hopefully going to give five more rounds of grants. So as you can see from the map here, we have given grants to try and preserve material all over the world, but you will see some bits where we do not do projects. So we do not fund material that is kept in the United States, Canada, Australia, and you'll also see most of Europe also doesn't qualify. I thought it would be nice to sort of share the sorts of images of where we have had projects, just to give a sense of the variety of places where we have funded and some of the reasons why we've funded. So the top left corner is a picture of Tuvalu, which was one of our first projects. And you can see that it's very low lying. And unfortunately, the view is that at the end of the century, this island will be completely submerged due to global warming. And so we digitized the archives, the national archives there. The central image is in China, so we have had a few projects to digitize material in languages and in scripts that might be at risk. And then in the top right corner, we've had, this is a particular project that took place in Senegal. Local families had archival material, particularly manuscripts. This is Wolof Ajami manuscripts. So because families might not be able to store their material in ideal conditions, they're also at risk. So that was one project. Then other ones, I'm not going to point them all out, but the bottom left corner is Tuvalu, which is the most remote inhabited island in the world. And we've had a project there. Unfortunately, earlier this year it had a hurricane and that sort of is the similar sort of theme. We've had projects in India and there's another project in Cuba that I'm just highlighting. So we only, we fund, and I'll go into more detail, the types of grant we fund, but the material does not leave the country. All the digitization is done in situ. We try and train people locally. So there's an element of local capacity building. And also the material and the equipment, we pay for the equipment that gets usually imported and the equipment stays behind as well. So the idea is that once people have been trained and then they have the equipment, they can follow on with other projects. So there are some nice images here that I just thought I'd like to flag. The top left one, unfortunately there, the copy stand broke. And I always love this image because the team thought out of the box and this is a weaving loom. And the camera, as you will see, is placed just over the archival material. But you can see the variety of places where the digitization takes place. We've had projects in monasteries. We've had projects in people's homes. Some projects because of the lack of electricity, they've had to be carried out outside. But this gives you a real sense of the variety of different projects we've had. I also feel I should sort of really emphasize that although it's called the Endangered Archives Programme, we have an extremely broad view of what an archive can be. And here are just the sort of tip of the iceberg of the sorts of projects we have funded. So printed material we will consider, photographs. Perhaps some of our earliest material is a project that digitized rock inscriptions in Libya. We've had several projects that have digitized newspapers, journals, manuscripts. Also many projects have digitized ecclesiastical records or court records. We've even had projects that have digitized temple murals. And this is an image from a Jain temple. And also the last one, the Cilophon Record Label. We also digitized sound material and at the moment we have 25,000 sound recordings available online. So it's not just paper, we also focus on sound. But we fund projects where the sound might be on a format that is at risk. We don't fund the creation of all histories. I thought I would pick, choose some images from some of our recent projects just to give you a sense of the sorts of projects we've had. This was a pilot project. The Endangered Archives Program offers at the moment three types of grant. A pilot project which can last anything up to a year and we fund up to 15,000 pounds for a pilot project. And usually a pilot project might be either a small digitization project. So the material, there isn't a huge amount of it and it can all be done within a year and under 15,000 pounds or it might be a case of a survey. Somebody believes that there might be material that needs to be preserved but they're not quite sure what it is. So it might be a survey of a region or it might be a survey of a particular location. And this is what happens in this particular project. So it was a railway workers archive and as you can see from the central photograph, the material is in a terrible state. And usually what we ask for with pilot projects is that a small sample of digitization is carried out as part of the pilot and we then make that available. What very often happens is that once somebody has had a pilot project and it's been deemed successful, they then apply for a major grant. And that usually is up to two years, can be anything up to 60,000 pounds. And very often what will happen is we will pay for archival boxing. That's true for pilot projects as well but sometimes, for example, in this image, the material is in such dire circumstances but it may be felt that another archival home within the country might be more suitable. So sometimes it's moved to the National Archives or a university might want to look after the archives. It's never taken out of the country but sometimes somewhere more suitable can be found within the country. So there's the pilot project, the major grant and then we also have an area grant. This has only been introduced from last year and to date we've not funded any area grants but this is a much larger project again with two years maximum but you can apply for up to 150,000 pounds but for this you have to have had quite a substantial amount of digitization experience and you need to contact the EAP office beforehand. This is another pilot project that was carried out. This is one of my favorite projects mainly because of the logistical issues that the project undertook. So this project wanted to find out what Tibetan Buddhist material there was in Siberia but they could only access parts of the country in winter and the picture on the far left is of this campervan traveling along a frozen river to get to try and find out the manuscripts. So I feel I should explain how each project is assessed to see whether it is successful. So there are three main areas that an application is assessed on. So the content, the content of the material must be seen as being endangered. It must have research value. We also take the age of the material into consideration. The endangered archives program considers anything up to the mid 20th century. So yes, anything up to 1950. Then we have a sister program that's coming out of UCLA called the Modern Endangered Archives Program and they will consider anything from the 20th century onwards mostly any material that dates from 1950 to the present day. And the last thing that for the content that must be considered is the legal and ethical rights whether the community that you are dealing with is happy to have their material put online. Then the other thing if you're considering applying to EAP is the project team. The application is assessed on the track record of the principal applicant. Up to four people can apply but there's always one principal applicant. The skills and the knowledge set of the project team. And the final thing that gets assessed is the project plan. It has to have be feasible. There has to be an element of local capacity training and it has to be a realistic budget as well. So this is a major grant. This is just coming to its end. It's in Senegal as well and going around various communities digitizing Ajami manuscripts. Dear. And this is another major grant which just submitted its outputs. We insist that the material is submitted by hard drives and their hard drive is apparently on their way to us now. So we ask for the metadata and the hard drives to be sent. The decisions on the applications is done on an annual basis by an international panel of experts who come to the British Library each April and they assess the applications. The applications are done in a staggered way. So the call for preliminary applications is now open. And if you're thinking that you know of material that might be appropriate for an EAP grant, the date you need to keep in mind is the 11th of November. That is the deadline for our preliminary applications. What happens is the panel then does an initial sift and then by December, those that have made it through the first stage are invited to submit a detailed application. And at the detailed application stage, we expect grant of permission forms for the copyright holders or the owners of the material and the detailed application is it's a much larger document and the deadline for that is roughly the mid of February. And then the panel meets in April and the applicants usually find out in May or June whether they've been successful. You can tell that this is quite a long process from when you've originally applied to when you hear whether you've been successful or not. So we are introducing a rapid response grant as well. And that we will do a much faster feedback. But that is a six, it has to be six months and is a sort of survey and a salvage operation. But we haven't introduced those just yet. Some of our most challenging projects we have collaborated with particularly with other organizations, particularly with the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. We have two projects at the moment that are particularly challenging that we have collaborated with the Himmel with. One is in Timbuktu. Three of the libraries when the jihadists entered Timbuktu chose not to have their manuscripts go to Bamako. And this project is to digitize those manuscripts that are still in Timbuktu. And we also have another project that has just been awarded to digitize the manuscripts at Omari Mosque in Gaza. So if you feel that you would like to apply it, but it is quite a challenging project, we do pair up with other organizations. To do a bit of a plug, I also would like to bring your attention to remote capture. This was published in April of last year. Everything we do is freely available. So this is a book that you can download even if you're not interested in applying to EAP but would like to be involved in digitization when you're doing your research. Hopefully you will find this book useful, although it's mainly aimed at applying to EAP. It gives hopefully lots of advice on things that you should consider when you're in the field and you're carrying out a digitization project. And then we're also aware that we're trying to improve on videos. So we are beginning to do lots of in-house videos on how to digitize using as little English as we can so that they will have as wide reach as possible. And another video that we have online where we're really trying to show people what good digitization is. And this was a project in Vietnam where people went from various homes but were able to set up quite a high-grade digitization studio in people's homes. And we just want to show either current projects or people thinking of applying the sort of standards we would be expecting and what can be done. We've had one webinar in English for preliminary applications and we might do another one while the call is open. And we've done this summer three in other languages, Arabic, Spanish, and French. On our website, if you go to the EAP blog, the slides are all available. So if you're in areas that speak these languages and you want to share this information with other people, I'd like just to flag it that this is a useful resource. And then the material. We have over 7 million images online through the Universal Viewer. We are beginning to become stricter with our permission forms. We ask for grant of permission forms available. This means that researchers are able to download the JPEG images. We require the images to be TIF for archival purposes but we make JPEG 2000 images available for research. So if we are given permissions, you'll see on the left hand the Creative Commons license. So we make everything available through a Creative Commons license when we've got permission forms for non-commercial purposes. So even if the material is deemed out of copyright, we only make it available for non-commercial purposes. And you'll see also that the images are all triple F compliant. And I think that's everything that I can think of. But if you have lots of questions, I'd love to hear them and hopefully answer any questions that you might have. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jody, for that presentation. So I thought that while we let the fellows and alumni of the program kind of think through their questions, and if you have questions, please do put them in the Q&A box at the bottom, which you can get to by hovering over the bottom of the screen. And we'll try to answer all of them. But I thought that for the starting question, something that might be of interest to this crowd, is talking specifically about how you see the role of scholars in these grant applications and some experiences that you've talked a little bit about experiences you've had of scholars who have partnered with Endangered Archives. So we have various types of applications. We have applications that are from institutions, universities in Western institutions, that apply because they have done the research and they know of the material that they've been doing their research on. We also have applications from within the country itself, usually from the director or somebody involved with the institution where the archival material is held. Up to four people can apply to EAP, and it doesn't necessarily matter who is the principal applicant, but what the panel wants to see is the expertise from that team. EAP does not pay for administration charges. So if you're working for an institution, a university that normally takes something like 20% admin fees to manage a grant, we would not pay for that. So you may want to think logistically who should be the principal applicant. I should also explain that as well as the material not leaving the country, the master digital copy doesn't leave the country. The British Library just has a copy of the digital material that we put online for research purposes. So the person applying must have a local archival partner who makes the material available locally because we're aware that some of our places, the broad bandwidth might mean researchers within countries cannot access the website easily. So again, if you're applying from outside, you've got to think who your local archival partner would be. Great, thank you. So I see that there's a question that came in in the chat box, and it says, I noticed no funded projects in Japan is that an excluded zone as well. Interesting, we try and give awards where resources are limited. So it really depends. Somebody has thought of, without giving too much away, a project in Japan where there are minority that live in Japan who may want to have their material preserved. We've not done anything in Japan to date, but that's not to say something like that might be considered by the panel in the future. I hope that's answered the question. So our next question is from Devin, who is working to conserve materials from Molly and women activists in the 20th century that are working materials of their associations and sometimes workplace. Many of these women are still living. Can you speak more about the copyright permissions? What kinds of information is included in the grants permission form? Is this a transfer of copyright from the individual to the British Library? Can you provide more information to clarify this? This might actually be more of a question for the modern endangered archival. Exactly. I mean, it sounds very much that this sort of project would fit more comfortably within the modern endangered archives program, which is out of UCLA. We do have a link from our website to their website, or if you just Google them, I'm sure it would come up. So I feel you're probably best off talking to them because I know copyright is different in the States than it is in Britain. So I feel probably, I mean, if you want to email me, hopefully you can see my email at the bottom. Do contact me and I'll put you in touch with them as well, if that's the route you'd like to go down. And I'm happy to put you in touch with the team there. And I will say that the modern endangered archives program is quite new. I believe they're in their second year right now, Jodi correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, they've just had their first panel meeting. So the first round are just, I think, in the process of being notified whether they're successful or not. So if you are interested in learning more about that program, I believe they actually have a webinar on October 24th, where you can talk to them directly. And I wrote down from their websites, I thought we might have questions about this. So their application opens September 30th, and those applications are due on November 8th. But I know that a lot has kind of been tweaked from the first year to the second year, which is part of the reason why, because of the timing, we didn't invite them to join us this time. But maybe in the future, we'd love to kind of get them to talk to this group. And I mean, a lot of what the processes are very similar for them and us. So although the material might be a better fit for them, I don't think you've wasted your time listening to this presentation. Hopefully you haven't. So while we wait to see if any more questions come in, I would love to hear about your experience. If you have any tips for forming good, strong, like equitable, solid partnerships between scholars and archives from what you've seen. I think usually it happens because the researcher has spent significant amount of time with the archive. They've built up those relationships with the people working there. I mean, sometimes the projects, they cannot, you know, they will fund to go to the archive, set it up, then maybe go halfway through the program and then go towards the end of the project as well. And to have that really good understanding, to know those colleagues that you've been working with really means whether it's a successful project or not, I think. And for those fellows who are working in archives that may be at risk in North America or Europe, do you have any recommendations of places that they might look? Oh, I know. No, I'm afraid I don't. I mean, I know one for Britain, but no. Sadly. Do you want to share the British one? Well, if there is a, particularly for manuscripts, there is a grant that you can apply to. And again, contact me directly. But there is a grant that you can apply to, to have manuscripts digitized within the UK. And that's a great point because many of the European countries will have national grants. And Canada sometimes does as well. In the US, obviously, there's IMLS and NEH, and then Clear has two digitization programs as well. So if you're interested in learning more about those, please be in touch. Everyone who works on the Mellon Fellowships Program also in some capacity works on those programs. So I guess, oh, here we go. Oh, it's one more question. Can the grant be used for restoration as well or only digitization? So we pay for what we would say preservation rather than conservation or restoration. So we will pay for archival boxes, melanics, dehumidifiers, that sort of thing. But we don't pay for conservation, detailed conservation. Great. And are there any additional questions? So in that case, why don't we close with the question about general tips for applicants? What would you recommend that applicants prioritize when forming their application? What are some areas that maybe people might commonly struggle with? Oh, I think usually the budget, a budget can tell whether somebody is successful or not. Also, we try and give hints how much material, how long it will take, this sorts of things, the equipment. I mean, I would really strongly recommend, if anybody's thinking of applying, that they do go to remote capture. The first chapter is about managing a project, knowing how much sort of seeing how much material you have and roughly therefore estimating how long it would take. If you have a lot of material, don't assume that if you have more members of staff working on that team, that if you double it, it will be done in twice the time, in half the time. Then, again, we've got a chapter on good images versus images we've received in the past that just don't quite meet our standards. We try and follow the British Library standards for digitization. So 300 PPI or 400 PPI and above, depending what the material is, TIFFs or WAV files. So really get to know the sort of standards we would be expecting. We also, there is a link from the book to the equipment that we approve. We're aware that certain cameras work better in certain places because they've got better sealants. So look at the sort of equipment that we're suggesting. Don't try and save money on the equipment because you want to make savings. Make sure you're asking for a good camera and a good lens. And just make sure you have the language expertise that if you're not going to be there the entire time and we need to communicate with the team as well, make sure that there's somebody who probably can communicate with the EAP team or otherwise you will have to be that go-between person that we will contact you and you will constantly having to ask the questions on our behalf. So it's always good to have the languages for the material that it's in. We expect the metadata to be completed on a listing spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet. Make sure that there's somebody in your team that really understands Excel. We don't expect people to understand archival hierarchy and we really do try and provide guidance as the project goes on. We're always worried when we get silence. We'd much rather be asked lots and lots of questions rather than a project just go very quiet on us. So making sure that the team has that skill set is useful. Yeah, I think that's probably the main things that I can suggest. Well, thank you so much, Jodi, for that question and all of them and for this excellent overview of the program. And thanks to all of the attendees for joining us. We're so glad that you're interested in this and it fills us with hope. So as a reminder, the deadline for the program is November 11th. And if you have any follow-up questions, Jodi's contact information is up here on the screen. And we look forward to seeing the fabulous projects that make him out of this. Yes, yeah. So do get in touch, please get in touch. So long, everyone.