PartnershipsModern Endangered Archives Program

Available Funding

At a Glance

 

2020-2021 Call for Applications now closed.

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MEAP seeks to fund projects to preserve and document collections at risk from environmental conditions, political uncertainty, inherently unsustainable media, inappropriate storage, or communal and social change.

We offer two levels of support for projects to organize, collect, convert and describe archival material or existing digital assets. All digitized objects are published online and preserved in perpetuity by the UCLA Library.

AVAILABLE GRANTS

PLANNING GRANTS of up to $15,000 to evaluate or survey collections for digitization and/or curation. Planning grant projects can be up to one year in length.

PROJECT GRANTS of up to $50,000 to digitize archival content or curation of already-digital assets. Grant funded projects should address the full lifecycle of digitization, including the imaging as well as content description and digital asset delivery to the UCLA Library. Project grants can be up to two years in length. Projects should be well organized before digitization begins. If you require substantial time to evaluate and survey the archival material, you should consider applying for a planning grant. 

MEAP has some designated funds for Emergency Grants to be given outside the regular funding cycle. Funds of up to $10,000 are available for 6 month projects. Applications may be invited at any time during the year due to the time sensitive nature of a proposed project.  Applications will follow the same process for evaluation as other applications types, including review by an external referee, technical experts, and the MEAP review board.

 

FUNDING AVAILABLE  |  CALL FOR FUNDING 2021-2022

 

PROJECT ELIGIBILITY

MEAP supports projects to organize, collect, convert and describe archival materials, existing digital assets, or born-digital materials. Materials must fit within the following scope.

ENDANGERMENT: Archival content must be imminently at-risk due to environmental conditions, political uncertainty, inherently unsustainable media, inappropriate storage, and/or communal or social change.

AGE OF MATERIAL: From the early 20th century to the present, preferably with a majority of the material dating from the 1950s or later.

CONTENT: Materials should document history, society, culture, and politics, with an emphasis on social justice, human rights, and under-documented communities.

GEOGRAPHIC FOCUS: Materials from regions outside North America and Europe are preferred. We encourage applications from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Applications from North America and Europe are eligible to apply only if resources are limited for preserving archival material and other avenues for funding have been exhausted.

FORMAT: Materials may be in a variety of formats, including print, audio, video, photographs, ephemera, and born-digital files (including but not limited to blogs, cell phone videos, website pages, 3D images, magnetic tape, and social media content).
 

Consider alternate funding if your project does not fit within this scope >

 

ADDITIONAL ELIGIBILITY

Projects must have one single principal applicant who takes responsibility for the planning and execution of the project. The principal applicant will also be responsible for the financial management of the grant. Individual applicants must be associated with an institution and cannot apply for independent funding. If the grant applicant is not affiliated with the owning repository of the materials, there must be a letter of support from the owning repository.

ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: Individual applicants must be associated with an institution and cannot apply for independent funding. Applicants may be:

  • Any accredited member of teaching or research faculty at a university or similar higher education institution.

  • Archivists and librarians with responsibilities for special collections in archives, a national or research library, or a similar institution.
  • Affiliated leaders of not-for-profit organizations or community organizations that hold at-risk cultural heritage materials.

ELIGIBLE INSTITUTIONS: Grants must be administered by not-for-profit organizations. Host institutions should be a community organization, university, archive, library, research or cultural institution.

  • Applications from state institutions requesting support for the preservation of their own holdings should demonstrate some contribution in kind, such as the provision of staff time, training or workspace.
  • Each project must have an administrative contact who has financial and signatory authority (this may be the principal applicant or another individual at the funded institution.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

Proposals will be evaluated by an international panel of scholars based on the following criteria.

  • Urgency of the project, as reflected by the vulnerability of the materials, due to environmental conditions, political uncertainty, inherently unsustainable media, inappropriate storage, and/or communal and social change.
  • Scholarly significance and uniqueness of the materials proposed for digitization.
  • Viability of online publication based on signed rights statements, ethical rights analysis, and articulated commitment to the program’s Open Access policy.
  • Project feasibility according to timeframe and resources requested, including physical space and personnel to conduct the activities proposed.
  • Expertise and experience of the applicants and project team.
  • Commitment and planning within the proposed project to create metadata in English and the language of the culture in which the materials were created.

 

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