Archival Grant

From time to time, we like to take note of donations to the university that do not involve brick-and-mortar construction. Here is one such grant:

UCLA Library has received the largest grant in its 139-year history: $13 million over eight years to digitize and make at-risk cultural heritage materials from the 20th and 21st centuries available online to the public. The grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, renews a five-year, $5.5 million commitment that launched UCLA Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program, known as MEAP, in 2018. At a time when cultural heritage materials are targeted and destroyed around the world, this new grant ensures that UCLA will remain a leading force for preserving global knowledge, said Ginny Steel, Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian.

Through MEAP, the library grants subawards to project teams representing cultural heritage organizations and archives outside of North America and Europe. In its first four years, the program has committed $2.8 million in subawards to 88 projects in 46 countries, supporting work to document and digitize collections that reflect the experiences and cultural expressions of diverse communities. The funded projects preserve all forms of media materials, including audio recordings, political ephemera, studio and vernacular photography, film and video, financial ledgers, newspapers and cultural productions. "We are grateful to Arcadia for continuing to advance the library’s work to digitize and make openly accessible primary source materials that speak to the experiences of individuals around the world who have been largely left out of historical and national narratives," Steel said...

Full news release at https://meap.library.ucla.edu/about/news/ucla-library-to-expand-global-preservation-work-thanks-to-largest-grant-in-its-history/.

To hear the text above, go to the link below:

https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/library%20grant.mp3