 One of the issues in Southeast Asia particularly is vulnerability to natural disasters. There was a tsunami in Ache, of course. What we saw was that people would start selling these things because they needed the money. These are the essential written records for understanding the political history, but also social history, economic history, the history of ideas, about what their past was actually like. It's really challenging for a region like Southeast Asia where it's hot and humid to preserve this material which easily becomes brittle and they perish away. So learning about how to preserve them, this is something I think is very important. In Ghana, in Accra, we go and we see collections of documents just covered with cockroaches and even mice and rats. If we don't manage to preserve, to digitize this material, it will be lost forever. EAP offers the kind of financial resources. The ground is really helpful for libraries and cultural institutions to preserve, to conserve and to digitize material in the way they should be done. What the EAP does is give a simple and practical way of documenting it so that we do get to keep something in the face of really quite major barriers to the preservation of this kind of thing. My own project is digitizing archives around architecture and building permits and urban history in Accra. And we've been contacted by different people who saw the news story about this grant because it sort of went viral on Ghana social media telling us, oh we have this collection of images and it's suffering water damage. We go and we see collections of documents that are covered with heaps of dust over 50 years, 60 years. Even as I was handling some of the material documents were disintegrated in my hands in front of my very eyes and then the first day going to the archive to get some of this material was just the most amazing thing. When we digitized our first images and scanned them and uploaded them on the computer there's also this overwhelming relief that now it can't disappear. Well I was approached by a historian and I really could not believe that there was such opportunity because these are the collections of cloistered nuns. That means that otherwise you would not be able to approach them for the very rules that they follow. These are materials that document the life of these women not only their views about religion let's say or a life of prayer and devotion but at least what interests me is about their daily life. In order to learn about the life of many people that otherwise we would not have any kind of document that could tell us that they ever were in this world. So in that respect the opportunities that EAP has offered have been really excellent to have access to funds to rescue or even to save some collections that otherwise would have been lost. Usually research projects that are from institutions in the West are mostly extractive. They go and get their data and then it goes outside the country and people in the country don't really know anything that has been done. The EAP material is completely different because it is material that still belongs to the people who own it and I think it gives a different kind of perspective. Decolonizing the archives is a very important aspect of any digitization program. So in that sense EAP is exemplary in the kind of work it does it has offered a model it makes rare archival resources available to global audiences. For the many underprivileged students and scholars from the global south EAP is a scholarship heaven that they or we can access without any specific restrictions. The EAP is helping to make open access a much better norm in academia and then your narrative will emerge into time. Kind of amount of contextual information that you get with the EAP material so where it comes from, who owned it, whether it was read the kind of books that they found in company with I mean down to really simple things like a lot of the EAP material has annotations and marginalia and finger marks and so you can tell how much something was read, how much something was used so we can build up a much better picture of the reading culture, the management culture, the whole. The EAP projects are a step ahead in promoting and making accessible the voices of written tradition. The EAP is helping to reorient the writing of the understudied cultures especially in western academia. There's an increasing effort in many parts of the world to understand cultural history in a linear way in a very nationalist model whereas the availability of this kind of material makes it much more porous across regions and shows the shared histories of different regions for example India, Pakistan and Bangladesh which used to be one region one geographical entity. As a historian I am interested in people that are anonymous and so women are very much underrepresented in the historical records and so to have access to this material is very important and that is what interests me as a historian Why do they continue believing, praying, hoping or why would a woman decide to spend the rest of her life in a convent completely disconnected from their own family or the rest of the world if their life in the convent can be sometimes held but I think that is precisely this type of question because we as human beings carry these contradictions these secrets sometimes they have no other choice so I think for a historian that's an interesting thing to investigate We are taught that architecture started almost with Europeans in the country and indeed throughout my training in architecture school beyond things like the pyramids in Egypt it was almost as if there was no architectural history in my country I was very interested in why buildings from where I was from were not necessarily called architecture but buildings from outside Africa were seen as more deserving so this is the really great thing about the EAP program Through this archive I'm seeing indigenous architects and showing that they were conversants with drawing techniques and design techniques and very much contributing to global architecture in a way that in architecture school I had no idea about One fact that really stuck out to us while digitizing is just how many women were the ones submitting applications especially in the earlier days to build their own homes so this can also be read as a history of the place of women or the status of women in Accra and to think of the other archives that also tells similar stories that we've been told the wrong way or histories we've lost it would be really sad to lose all that rich history just because we cannot preserve or digitize them in time