ENDANGERED ARCHIVES PROGRAMME

Coming in October 2004

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.

The Programme is administered by the British Library and applications will
be considered by an International Panel of historians and archivists.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Further information about the timetable, criteria, eligibility and
procedures will be announced on the Programme's website at
www.bl.uk/endangeredarchives in October.

Preliminary enquiries or expressions of interest may be addressed now to
eapbl.uk.

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Sophie Arp

PA to Graham Shaw
Head, Asia Pacific & Africa Collections
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB

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