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>ENDANGERED ARCHIVES PROGRAMME
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>In pursuit of their general aim to support fundamental research into
>important issues in the humanities and social sciences, the Trustees of
>the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund have decided to sponsor a Programme
>focusing on the preservation and copying of important but vulnerable
>archives throughout the world.
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>The Programme is administered by the British Library and applications will
>be considered by an International Panel of historians and archivists.
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>The Programme will achieve its objectives principally by making a number
>of grants to individual researchers to locate relevant collections,
>wherever possible to arrange their transfer to a suitable local archival
>home, and to deliver copies into the international research domain via the
>British Library. Pilot projects may also be funded. Grants will be made
>each year and will vary in amount, but a guideline maximum of £50,000 for
>a full project, and £10,000 for a pilot project, is envisaged.
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>It will also make available - to overseas archivists and librarians only -
>bursaries for professional attachments at the British Library to foster
>better archival standards in cataloguing, preservation, etc., and thereby
>to assist the process of safeguarding other such collections locally in
>the future.
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>The aim is to safeguard archival material relating to societies usually at
>an early stage of development i.e. its normal focus will be on the period
>of a society's history before 'modernisation' or 'industrialisation' had
>generated institutional and record-keeping structures for the systematic
>preservation of historical records, very broadly defined. The relevant
>time period will therefore mostly vary according to the society with which
>we deal. The Programme will be completely open as to theme and regional
>interest, although it will normally, but not invariably, be concerned with
>non-western societies.
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>For the purposes of the Programme, archives will be interpreted widely to
>embrace not only rare printed sources (books, serials, newspapers,
>ephemera, etc.) and manuscripts in any language, but also visual materials
>(drawings, paintings, prints, posters, photographs, etc.), audio or video
>recordings, digital data, and even other objects and artefacts - but
>normally only where they are found in association with a documentary
>archive. In all cases, the validity of archival materials for inclusion
>in the Programme will be assessed by their relevance as source materials
>for the pre-industrial stage of a society's history.
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>The Fund does not offer grants to support the 'normal' activities of an
>archive, although the Programme may offer support for such items as costs
>directly related to the acceptance of relocated material.
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>Further information about the timetable, criteria, eligibility and
>procedures will be announced on the Programme's website at
>www.bl.uk/endangeredarchives in October.
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>Preliminary enquiries or expressions of interest may be addressed now to
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Dr T Caroline A Bressey
Department of Geography
University College London
26 Bedford Way
LONDON
WC1H OAP
020 7679 7586
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