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It’s been six years since UCLA Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program(opens in a new tab) (MEAP) made its first grant to digitize and preserve at-risk materials from communities and archives around the world. Today, with 139 projects in 57 countries funded, MEAP has published more than 73,000 items. Achieving this milestone has enabled MEAP to begin to use these collections to advance UCLA’s teaching and learning mission.
Program director Rachel Deblinger has already made great strides to activate this vision through a series called MEAP in the Classroom.
“I’m particularly interested in unflattening students’ understanding about how these collections came to be,” said Deblinger. “How human choices, funding limitations and technical structures impact what information is captured, shared, preserved, circulated and available.”
For a UCLA cluster seminar focusing on political violence and art-making, Deblinger used a collection of recently digitized posters from the Cultural Center’s graphic arts workshops, where artists created materials in support of the resistance movement in Chile against the Pinochet dictatorship.
“It was wonderful to bring in an example of artists and educators using art to reckon with the past,’’ said instructor Rachel Kaufman. “Students both learned about MEAP and gained a greater sense of archival work as restorative work happening in the present, as well as being introduced to the professional world of archiving and libraries. The class emphasis on the power and harm at the site of the archive was made a bit more optimistic through student awareness of community-driven archival work.”
MEAP published the culminating activity online for use by other instructors.