02 February 2017
New collections online - January 2017
Four new collections are now available to view on the EAP website. The teams involved have helped to preserve a wide variety of records including Peruvian parish registers, Romani archives, Russian Old Believers’ textual heritage, and Nyasaland African Congress records.
Over the past few years, researchers from the "Roma Ethnology" working group, in the Ethnic Minorities Department of the Institute of Cultural Heritage, undertook a series of field trips to Roma communities. They located 11 ethnographic Romani groups in Moldova, each with its specific pre-modern culture. The best known of these are: Layesh (ex-nomads Roma group), Lautari (Roma musicians), Lingurari (Roma spoon makers), Chokanary (Roma blacksmiths), Churary (Roma sieve makers), Curteni (Roma servants to local noble courts). During these field research trips among the Roma community the researchers became aware of the existence of valuable archival materials kept in a state of neglect. Most of these sources (photographs, documents, and manuscripts) are kept in family archives. They are endangered for a variety of reasons. For example, when the owners of personal archives die, their descendants are not interested in preserving them, and there is little funding within the country for collecting and archiving them. These archives are gradually disappearing.
This project aimed to discover these collections of Romani archive material to preserve, digitise and make them publicly available for research. The project team were able to discover and digitise material from the families of some well-known Roma personalities from the past, as well as material from ordinary Roma families. The digitised material is now publicly available in the Moldovan National Archive, as well as the British Library, and is an important source of information for Romani studies. The project digitised 2557 images from 36 individual collections dating from between 1925-2013.
EAP699/16/2 - Preida Iacov Collection - Roma Family-Military Album [1955-2010]
EAP699/7/2 - Muzeu Ciocilteni Collection - Papers [1942-1986]
EAP834: Living or leaving tradition: textual heritage of the taiga Old Believers' skit
The aim of this project was to preserve the hand-written book collections of the taiga community of Pilgrims, one of the most radical denominations among Old Believers: confident in the coming of the Antichrist and who regard the authorities as his servants, and also believe that a skit (a small-secluded monastery or convent) is a perfect place where the Orthodox faith can be observed. They prefer to live a reclusive life with other believers as they think this protects the Christian faith and the soul. The Russian monarchy and Soviet power regarded them as irreconcilable enemies and repeatedly destroyed Taiga religious settlements.
The manuscripts of the 15th, 17th and 18th centuries represent the Russian Orthodox and Early Old Believers’ traditions, and their digitisation will help researchers to reconstruct the reading habits of the Siberian peasants-skitniks and the ways of ‘book migrations’. The manuscripts of the 19th and 20th centuries reflect late Old Believers’ traditions and they are interesting as examples of the Russian peasant religious literature. It is believed that approximately 66% of the books were written or rewritten by the skitniks.
The preserved texts contain unique historical and linguistic information and reflect the process and results of assimilation of the culture of Cyrillic writing and reading by Siberian peasants in the 19th and 20th centuries. The manuscripts were stored in poor conditions, exposed to moisture and temperature changes, and were being damaged by mould and migration of ink. In addition, the Skit monks were often forced to write using home-made ink or pencil on paper of poor quality.
The project digitised 144 manuscripts with over 22,000 pages copied. The manuscripts selected for digitisation are those that most adequately reflect the confessional strategy, preferences and history of the taiga community since its formation in the 1830s. These include 1. Liturgy and religious rites: Prayer texts, church calendars and descriptions of rituals and festivals; 2. Canon law and monastic rules; 3. Writings on Christian/Old Believers’ ethics and morals; 4. Religious polemics; 5. Religious poetry; 6. Community history.
You can read more about this project on the project homepage, as well as project holder Professor Elena Dutchak’s Libri journal article: Breathing Life into Rare Book Collections: The Digitization of the Taiga Skit Old Believers Library (Libri. Volume 66, Issue 4, Pages 313–326). We have also funded a similar project - EAP556: Book heritage of Ural Old Believers, which also has its own blog post with more information. EAP834/1/1/56 - Theoktistos the Stoudite. The service for Jesus Christ [1950s-1960s]
EAP834/1/1/41 - The Dominical letter // Вруцелето // Vrutseleto [1941]
This project digitised parish registers detailing baptisms, marriages and deaths in the Diocese of Huacho, Peru. Six parish collections were digitised: Parish of San Miguel Arcangel of Acos; Parish of Nuestra Señora of the Asunción of Ámbar; Parish of Santa María Magdalena of Cajatambo; Parish of Inmaculada Concepción of Canta; Parish of San Juan Bautista of Churín; Parish of San Juan Bautista of Huaral.
These documents are of great value as in the majority of cases they are the only records of birth, death and marriage that exist for citizens of Peru. In 1852 the Civil status records were created but this function was first entrusted to Governors, and then to the municipalities under the supervision of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Republic. Consequently, the records of the Civil State in Peru lacked a hierarchical organisation as their offices and files were dispersed in more than 2,500 locations, with no national or regional registers of births, deaths or marriages. For this reason the majority of citizens born before 1940 have great difficulty locating their records.
EAP783/1/6/1 - Books of Deaths-Parish Nuestra Señora of the Asunción of Ámbar [1901-1940]
EAP942: Preserving Nyasaland African Congress historical records
The pilot project surveyed Nyasaland African Congress (NAC) records in selected districts in Malawi in order to assess the state of records, their storage conditions, and determine the extent as well as the preservation needs. The project created an inventory of the records and digitised a small selection of the identified records including minutes of meetings of the NAC; the NAC constitution; editorial comments of Malawi News pertaining to the Malawi Congress Party (MCP - successor organisation to NAC); photographs of the late Hon. Aleke Banda, a prominent nationalist and politician.
EAP942/1/3 - Photos of Aleke Banda
EAP942/1/1 - Nyasaland African Congress Constitution of Organisation [1943]
01 September 2016
Call for Applications
Do you know of any collections that are currently at risk and need preserving? The Endangered Archives Programme is now accepting grant applications for the next annual funding round – the deadline for submission of preliminary applications is 4 November 2016 and full details of the application procedures and documentation are available on the EAP website. This year we will also be accepting online applications.
EAP843: Part of the Archibishopric’s Archive, Sandiago de Cuba. A pilot project undertaken in 2015 with a major project about to begin.
The Endangered Archives Programme has been running at the British Library since 2004 through funding by Arcadia, with the aim of preserving rare vulnerable archival material around the world. This aim is achieved through the award of grants to relocate the material to a safe local archival home where possible, to digitise the material, and to deposit copies with local archival partners and with the British Library. These digital collections are then available for researchers to access freely through the British Library website or by visiting the local archives. The digital collections from 165 projects are currently available online, consisting of over 5 million images and several thousand sound recordings.
This year we have started making our sound recordings available for online streaming and one of our most popular archives is the Syliphone Label.
The Programme has helped to preserve manuscripts, rare printed books, newspapers and periodicals, audio and audio-visual materials, photographs and temple murals. Since 2004 approximately 300 projects have been funded. Last year awards were given for projects based in Argentina, Bulgaria, Cuba, Ghana, India, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Malawi, Mexico, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan and Turks and Caicos Islands.
The following images give a sense of the type of material that went online over the past year.
EAP692/1/1/2 Alagar kovil Kallalagar Inner Mandapa Ceiling East [17th Century]. Part of the pilot project to digitise temple murals in Tamil Nadu. The team have now started a major grant.
EAP727/6/25: བླ་མའི་རྣལ་འབྱོར་བསམ་པ་ལྷུན་འགྲུབ་དང་མྱུར་འགྲུབ་མ་བཞུགས་སོ།། (bla ma'i rnal 'byor bsam pa lhun 'grub dang myur 'grub ma bzhugs so) [Mid-19th century]. Tibetan Buddhist manuscript from Amdo, PR China
EAP755/1/1/86 Mendoza. Photographs taken by Annemarie Heinrich, Argentina. The team working on this project have also been awarded a major grant.
EAP856/1/6 Journal du Premier Ministre Rainilaiarivony (Tome III) [May 1881 - Sep 1881]. 19th century archives written by Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony (written in Malagasy. Another project is also underway on Madagascar.
So, if you know of an archive in a region of the world were resources are limited, we really hope you will apply. If you have any questions regarding the conditions of award or the application process, do email us at [email protected]
08 June 2016
New collections online - May 2016
Last month we put three new collection online - EAP689, EAP700 and EAP727
EAP689: Constituting a digital archive of Tamil agrarian history (1650-1950) - phase II
This project, digitising vulnerable documents relating to Tamil agrarian history, is a continuation of the earlier projects carried out in the same region – EAP314 and EAP458. The project aimed to enhance the work already accomplished by visiting some of the locations identified in these earlier projects, as well as new locations, and digitising a variety of vulnerable documents held in private homes in Tamil Nadu. 36 new collections were digitised, bringing the total number, including those from previous projects, up to 74 collections in total. The sizes of the 36 new collections digitised vary from one single document to over a 300 documents per collection. The 36 collections comprise 135 different series which cover a wide variety of genres and topics such as: folk songs, poems, hymns, horoscopes, astrology, sorcery, nikantu, tamil lexicon, medicine, harvest accounts, land lease, land settlements, land partition, land dispute, land record, tax and temple accounts. judgements from the colonial courts and local judicial assemblies, petitions over land dispute, sale, punishment for communication with excommunicated persons, marriage agreement and caste integrity, compensation to families after self-immolation of widows, security rights (kaval), right to access water for agriculture from the lake, dowry details, business communications and accounts with Burma, film pamphlets.
EAP689/6/1/1 - Agreement for temple renovation - Copper-plate
EAP689/21/2/4 - Invitation Letters - Paper [1912-1931]
EAP689/27/1/53 -Music Guide book PB 53 [1939]
EAP700: Preservation of the manuscripts of the Jaffna Bishop's House (1850-1930)
The central aim of this pilot project was to digitise, preserve and disseminate the rare French manuscripts and other documents kept in the Jaffna Bishop’s House in Sri Lanka. These manuscripts are becoming more and more vulnerable to human and natural disasters and merit urgent digitisation for posterity. Jaffna, in the northern part Sri Lanka, inhabited by the Tamil ethnic minority since the independence of Sri Lanka (1948) has been subject to serious ethnic, cultural and political conflicts. One of the most tragic events was the burning of the Jaffna Public library along with its 97,000 volumes of books and manuscripts on 1 June 1981. The Jaffna public library was considered one of the biggest in Asia.
This collection of manuscripts has escaped the bombings and shelling of past decades. They have been stored in wooden cupboards in a reinforced room of the Bishop’s House adjoining the Cathedral, in a strategically sensitive district of Jaffna City. They are, however, highly vulnerable due to their age and their current condition of poor storage, insect infestations, occasional human mishandling, humidity and other natural and environmental disasters. Some of them are in such a fragile state that they are unable to be handled.
These manuscripts and documents are part of the collections of the Catholic mission in Sri Lanka and cover a wider geographical area including the Jaffna peninsula, Mannar, Puttalam and the Vanni regions. The majority of the manuscripts are in French. This makes the collection a rare and unique heritage and should shed new insights on the contribution of the French missions in this region. They contain a variety of information about the Diocese and the parish and the parishioners. They cover two periods: the second half of the 19th century with the commencement of the Missions; and the period before, during, and after the First World War, a period that is also of great historical importance because of its implications in the colonies. They pertain to two broad domains of the history of Christianity and Christian missions in Sri Lanka, and also the cultural history of ethnic minorities in general and with special reference to the Tamils.
The project digitised 58 files, creating a total of 16,944 digital images instead of the 7,000 that were originally planned. The files mostly consist of manuscripts dated from between 1850 and 1930. The project digitised a diverse collection of records such as memoirs of missionaries or codices; records detailing day to day life; observations on economic and social conditions; personal letters; account books giving detailed explanations of the income and expenses related to the missions, churches and cathedral, and daily accounts of the expenditures on different chapters like school, orphanage, and charity; catalogues of letters sent by missionaries; sermons and commentaries.
EAP700/1/2/2 - The Jaffna Diocese and the OMI - Supplement, containing letters & documents [1848-1861]
EAP700/1/8/1 - Statistics of the Diocese of Jaffna [1929]
EAP727: Preservation of Tibetan Ngakpa manuscripts in Amdo region (Qinghai and Gansu Provinces, PRC)
Amdo is a region located in the northeastern area of the Tibetan Plateau. Due to its geographical features of high mountain ranges and vast grasslands, fragmented and scattered institutions of local power have been the prevalent forms of the ruling agency, until its formal inclusion in the administrative system of People’s Republic of China in 1958. In this socio-historical context, Ngakpa have been playing a leading role in the religious life of Amdo Tibetan communities, embodying a sort of independent channel of transmission, alternative to monastic practice. Ngakpa are extremely knowledgeable bearers of the non-monastic tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and Bon religions. They mainly act as ritual masters for a number of different purposes and have a high level of expertise in Tibetan meditation practices, medicine, astronomy and traditional knowledge as a whole.
Despite the recent popularity of Ngakpa teachings in the Western world, their survival in the original context is threatened by the increasing marginalisation of their social role and the lack of potential students in the young generation, captivated by new opportunities offered by the Chinese fast-growing economy. The preservation of Ngakpa’s textual heritage is a factor of primary importance for ensuring the perpetuation of this ancient laic tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. This project was exclusively concerned with the preservation of the most endangered manuscripts of one specific group of Ngakpa in the Amdo region, those belonging to the Nyingmapa tradition, the most ancient school of Tibetan Buddhism.
A pilot survey was carried out by the local archival partner and it emerged that between 70 and 100 pecha (the traditional format of Tibetan books, made of long paper pages compressed between two wooden boards and bounded together with a string) of different lengths, privately-owned by thirty Ngakpa, were in very poor physical condition and situated in precarious locations, exposed to the damages of humidity, rats, use and age.
The manuscripts date from between the early 19th and the end of the 20th centuries. Several of them are unique copies that were rescued during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when they were hidden in various provisional locations, wedged in wall fissures and buried underground. The topics covered by the texts are heterogeneous: rituals, medicine, history, astrology, astronomy, divination, hagiography, mantras, manuals for the construction of traditional ritual objects, such as mandala, stupa and torma (decorated and painted offerings made of barley flour and butter).
The scattered location of the texts and the difficulty to reach them in remote mountain areas required extensive travel among different villages in Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (all in Qinghai Province) and Southern Gansu Province.
EAP727/1/100 - རྒྱལ་བ་སྐུ་གསུམ་གྱི་རྣམ་ཐར་ཡོངས་འདུས་ལྗོན་པ་བཞུགས་སོ།། (rgyal ba sku gsum gyi rnam thar yongs 'dus ljon pa bzhugs) [Early 20th century]
EAP727/6/25 - བླ་མའི་རྣལ་འབྱོར་བསམ་པ་ལྷུན་འགྲུབ་དང་མྱུར་འགྲུབ་མ་བཞུགས་སོ།། (bla ma'i rnal 'byor bsam pa lhun 'grub dang myur 'grub ma bzhugs so) [Mid 19th century]
05 May 2016
New collections online - April 2016
In April six collections were made available through the EAP website and BL Sounds. The variety of subjects, locations, and types of record really highlight the broad range of projects that the Endangered Archives Programme is involved in.
EAP190: Digitising archival material pertaining to 'Young India' label gramophone records
1427 recordings can be listened to on BL Sounds
Related record label ephemera, including catalogues and advertisements
Young India record and sleeve
The project digitised gramophone records, disc labels, record catalogues and publicity material from ‘The National Gramophone Record Manufacturing Company Ltd. Bombay’, which issued records under the ‘Young India’ label between 1935-1955. The company produced over 10,000 titles on 78-rpm, 10 inch diameter shellac discs with two songs per disc. The recordings of film, popular, classical and folk music, as well as educational material were issued mainly from amateur or up-and-coming artists. They feature music from different regions of India, sung in many different languages. The recordings have never been reissued on audio tape or CD and are therefore now available for many people to listen to for the first time. We have already received some great feedback about this collection, including one person who recalled his music teacher many years ago telling the students about Young India and how he used to be a tabla player for the label and regular D V Paluskar accompanist. He was delighted to find that he could now hear the actual music that his teacher talked about all those years ago. Hopefully, with this collection now available for anyone to listen to worldwide, many more people will discover or rediscover the recordings from the Young India label.
EAP468: To preserve Indian recordings on 'Odeon' label shellac discs
1404 recordings can be listened to on BL Sounds
Related record label ephemera, including catalogues and advertisements
Odeon record label advert
This project digitised shellac discs, record labels and associated ephemera from the Odeon record label. Odeon label shellac discs were issued in India between 1912-1938. The company produced over 2,000 titles of north and south Indian music. About 600 titles [1,200 songs] have survived and are with private collectors
Odeon label shellac discs were issued in India in two phases: during 1912-16; and during 1932-38. During the first phase, Odeon's first Indian recordings were made in late 1906 on a grand tour that took the engineers from Calcutta to Benares, then on to Lucknow, Cawnpore, Delhi, Amritsar, Lahore, Bombay and finally back to Calcutta. In all, they recorded some 700 titles, which were duly shipped back to Berlin for processing and manufacture in what was then the established worldwide pattern. Disc records manufactured and pressed in Germany were shipped back to India by 1908. Gramophone records were the only mode of public and family entertainment in that period. Because of the diversity of language and cultural taste, Odeon's engineers recorded a great deal of regional music for local consumption. In a time before film music swept regional variations away, Odeon's activities allowed Indians to listen to the music that would otherwise have been irretrievable. Very few disc records from this period have survived.
In the second phase, the Odeon disc manufacturing company operated during 1932-38. Its operations were mainly from Mumbai and Madras and the company produced over 2,000 titles in north and south Indian music. At this time, radio and film songs had just entered the entertainment era. Disc manufacturing and distribution activity continued until the outbreak of World War II. Because of the embargo imposed on German goods, the company had to wind up their business in India, leaving behind hundreds of titles. The musical genre recorded on these discs include drama songs, speeches, folk music, classical music, drama sets, skits and plays, vocal and instrumental music.
This project digitised a wide variety of documents related to the administration of the Cercle de Kaya colonial district. They are of interest to a wide range of historical study fields: population, politics, economy, development, customary law. These documents provide an insight into the local intricacies of the administration, politics, economy and social life of the district.
The material in Kaya though was at risk of neglect, physical deterioration and destruction. The documents were stacked on shelves and on the floor in a shed behind the administrative buildings, exposed to dust and moisture and at the mercy of rats, termites and mildew. More recent documents continued to be piled haphazardly on top of the old colonial ones. These colonial archives that for decades had been piled up in a shed in the former colonial district capital, Kaya, were packed up and transported to the Centre National des Archives (CNA) in Ouagadougou. At the CNA, the documents were thoroughly dusted and subsequently sorted, selected and subjected to an initial analysis. The documents were sorted into 4,200 files, with an average of 20 documents per file. Of these, about 40% were from the period 1919-1960 and eligible for digitisation.
Unfortunately, very little metadata was provided with this collection so file descriptions and titles are very limited. If you would like to volunteer your time to making this collection a more usable resource, please get in touch with us.
EAP650: Grima in Caloto Viejo: archiving Afro-Colombian history
This project made an inventory of the historical, notarial and judicial collections held in Caloto’s alcaldía (town hall), Colombia, and digitised a sample of the most valuable and damaged documents.
First founded in 1543, Caloto Viejo (Old Caloto) was the administrative capital of a wide region northeast of Popayán that included Native American groups, European settlers, their enslaved Africans, and maroon communities formed by escaped slaves. By the 1940s this rural region had not yet experienced industrialisation, yet many of Caloto Viejo’s towns had become autonomous districts. Now only the head of a small municipality, Caloto still houses the pre-modern documents of Caloto Viejo.
Caloto Viejo’s documents are crucial for Afro-Colombian history. Caloto and adjacent regions of the Cauca constituted the nineteenth century heartland of slavery, with Julio Arboleda’s massive Japio estate in Caloto the towering symbol of landholding power. The archives of Caloto are important for tracing the wider history of elites, native Americans, and Africans, and essential for salvaging the local history of important Afro-Colombian towns such as Puerto Tejada or the scholarly unknown maroon community of Caricacé with unique linguistic traditions, whose documentary history exists only in the endangered collections of Caloto.
EAP688: Digitisation of the Deed books in Saint Vincent for the slavery era, 1763-1838
EAP688/1/1/72 - Deed book 1822-1823
This project digitised surviving Deed books for Saint Vincent from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The Eastern Caribbean Court House, St Vincent, holds numerous historic manuscript documents connected with the colonial administration of the island. The earliest records date from 1763, when Saint Vincent was ceded to Britain at the end of the Seven Years’ War, until 1838, the date when Apprenticeship for slaves ended in the British Caribbean and slave emancipation was fully implemented in accordance with the Emancipation Act of 1834.
The Deed books include important material for researchers. After 1763, Saint Vincent was drawn into the orbit of slavery in the British Empire. Its sugar plantation sector expanded rapidly after that date and the island became (along with other Windward Islands such as Dominica, Grenada and Tobago) a new, expanding frontier for British slavery. The Deed books, compiled in the offices of the island’s Colonial Secretary and the Registrar, proved a comprehensive record of all land and property transactions carried out during the seventy-five years when slave plantations were the main type of investment and employment on the island. The Deed books are large bound volumes that are available for every year in the period from 1763 to 1838. The land and property details recorded in these records provide the names of investors, along with their occupation and residence, and precise financial details, either in sterling or in the island’s currency. The information on investors includes whites and free blacks, men and women, and absentee residents (in other West Indian Islands or in Britain) as well as those living in Saint Vincent. The financial information is wide-ranging. Credit transactions are included. Mortgages, annuities, loans and bonds are all specified, with the names of the parties involved. The Deed books contain much material on slave sales between individuals connected with Saint Vincent and they also have information on slave manumissions. Where sugar plantations are identified in these records, the numbers, and sometimes the valuations, of slaves are given. This is particularly useful for researchers for the period from 1763 to 1815 because it was not until after the end of the Napoleonic Wars that slave registration was commonly carried out throughout the British Caribbean.
EAP749/2/3/9 - Statue: Kunda (Wylie sku 'dra)
The Buchen are performers of specialist rituals, travelling actors, healers and exorcists, and disciples of the 14th/15th century Tibetan ‘crazy saint’ Tangtong Gyalpo. They reside in the culturally Tibetan Pin Valley in North India and are most famous for performing an elaborate exorcism ritual called the ‘Ceremony of Breaking the Stone’.
Buchen enact dramatisations of popular folk-tales, Buddhist morality plays which illustrate principles of karma and ideas of impermanence and are frequently enlivened with comedy. Buchen spread the teachings of Buddha through entertainment. These performances are related to the Tibetan Opera and to a tradition of lay religious performers called lama manipa, who retell the life stories of Tibetan saints whilst pointing out key scenes on narrative painted cloth scrolls (thangkas) with a metal pointer. Buchen theatrical performances contain a similar manipa-like introduction.
This project digitised or took images of a variety of texts, paintings and objects associated with these traditions, including images of masks, clothing, instruments and objects used in performances; thangkas; handwritten decorated and unbound Tibetan books (pecha).
EAP749/3/2/1 - Drowa Zangmo Thankga
EAP749/3/4/1 - Meme Buchen in full costume
25 February 2016
New collections online - February 2016
Three collections have gone online this month – EAP640, EAP726 and EAP729.
This project digitised a wide variety of ecclesiastical records dating from the 17th to 20th century that were located in the churches of Santa Cruz de Lorica and San Jerónimo de Buenavista in Montería in the Department of Córdoba in northern Colombia. These records include, amongst others, those associated with the sale of slaves, property and livestock; the records of mortgages, wills, debts, baptisms, deaths and marriage; land disputes; minutes of city council meetings, including those relating to decisions concerning public works, education and health. These records provide insights into one of the most ethnically diverse areas of Córdoba and allow researchers to explore unique information on racial demography, social and kin networks, and economic conditions of the region.
For a fantastic overview of the history of slavery in the region and the related projects (EAP255, EAP503, EAP640, EAP627, and EAP853) the Endangered Archives Programme have funded, I highly recommend reading the open access article: Researching the history of slavery in Colombia and Brazil through ecclesiastical and notarial archives, published in the EAP Anniversary publication From Dust to Digital. The article can also be downloaded as a PDF (809KB).
Parroquia San Geronimo de Monteria LIBRO DE DEFUNCIONES No. 002 [1808-1836]
EAP640/2/1/29
Parroquía San Gerónimo de Montería. LIBRO DE BAUTISMO No. 2 [1808]
EAP640/2/1/1
This project digitised copies of the ‘El Deber’ newspaper published between 1890 and 1962 in Arequipa, Peru. This paper was one of the most important politically conservative newspapers in the country. This influential Catholic gazette contributed to the national and regional debate on Church-State issues such as legalisation of divorce, secularisation of education, religious intolerance, confiscation of ecclesiastical assets, as well as broader topics such as the economy, social and ethical concerns, political interests and general religious affairs. The newspapers help to provide a portrait of daily life in the city and surrounding area, and are a great resource for researchers looking for information on political, social, cultural, genealogical, intellectual and religious history.
El Deber – 7th August 1945. Front page the day after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
EAP726/1/1/56/174
El Deber – 4th November 1890
EAP726/1/1/1/2
The Chinmaya International Foundation (CIF) in Kerala, India holds rare paper and palm leaf manuscripts dating back to the late 16th century. The manuscripts include information on arts, mathematics, religion, spirituality, architecture, science, technology, medicine, Ayurveda, rituals, Sanskrit literature, as well as many other topics and are written in various languages and scripts including Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil and in Devanagari, Grantha and old Malayalam.
Pañcatantram - Ancient collection of stories , probably first composed 300CE. It is an ancient Indian collection of inter related animal fables in verse and prose.
EAP729/1/1/40
Bhagavad Gītā - The Bhagavad Gita copied in 18th century AD
EAP729/1/2/39
28 October 2015
New images online - October 2015
This month we have had four projects go online. The first photographed temple murals in Tamil Nadu (EAP692). This is the first time that EAP has funded a project to preserve architectural art. These exquisite paintings were vulnerable for a variety of reasons, including the recent use of sand-blasting in temples. The pilot project digitised murals at five sites, four of which are Hindu: Alagarkovil Kallagar Temple (with art dating from the 17th Century); Madurai Meenakshi Sundareswara temple (16th Century murals); Narasingampatti - Chitrachavadi and Adiyamankottai, Chenraya Perumal temple (all 17th Century). The last location is a Jain complex at Tirumalai.
These paintings come from the east ceiling of the Alagar kovil Kallalagar Inner Mandapa and depict the continuous narration of the Ramayana.
EAP692/1/1/2 Alagar kovil Kallalagar Inner Mandapa Ceiling East [17th Century]
EAP692/1/1/2 Alagar kovil Kallalagar Inner Mandapa Ceiling East [17th Century]
The next two images come from cave 1 at Tirumalai and probably date between the 15th and 17th centuries.
EAP692/5/2 Tirumalai Jain Cave. Room 1 [16th Century]
EAP692/5/2 Tirumalai Jain Cave. Room 1 [16th Century]
The second project to go online was EAP759, a pilot project that digitised manuscripts from Sundarban Anchalik Sangrahashala, a regional museum housed in an abandoned part of Jadunath Nandi Hospital, in the South 24 Parganas District of West Bengal, India.
This illustration from EAP759 shows a page from another Hindu epic, this time the Mahābhārata.
EAP759/1/2 Mahabharata [19th century]
Madagascar was the location for the next project (EAP856), with the digitisation of archives of the nineteenth-century prime minister, Rainilaiarivony (1864-1895). The journals are written in Malagasy using Latin script that was introduced in 1823. The archives have been inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register since 2009. They have never been systematically studied and now that this invaluable resource is online, it will be of huge benefit to researchers.
EAP856/1/1 Photo Album D
EAP856/1/2 Journal du Premier Ministre Rainilaiarivony - Relations de diverses affaires traitée par le Premier Ministre [1866]
EAP698 was the last project to be made available this month, a major grant that digitised Cham manuscripts. An important cultural group within Vietnam, the Cham once had their own kingdom called Champa, which lasted from the 7th century to 1832. There are about 162,000 Cham people living in Vietnam today, concentrated in Central Vietnam and the Mekong Delta region.
The project digitised manuscripts from 25 private collections and below is a taste of what the manuscripts contain.
EAP698/15/6 Cham manuscripts collected by Ms. Dong Thi Hang, No.06
EAP698/1/11 Cham manuscripts collected by Mr. Sam Van Tanh, No.11 [Latter half of 20th century]"
I am sure we will have some more interesting projects to share next month, but if you can’t wait until the next blog to hear our latest news, do join our Facebook group.
23 September 2015
5 million images online
In February, the Endangered Archives Programme celebrated its tenth anniversary and the various press releases and newspaper articles all quoted that we had 4 million images online. It is hard to believe that today we reached the milestone of 5 million images.
I thought I would use this opportunity to reflect on some of the projects that have gone online since the beginning of the year – doing a ‘round the world’ selection.
One of the first projects to be made available this year was EAP164, which consisted of people's memoirs and diaries from rural societies along the Ukrainian Steppe. As well as paper archives, there is a wonderful selection of photographs giving a real sense of community, as this picnic illustrates.
EAP164/1/2/3 Album of photos of representatives of a family - Perovskyh [1891-1990]
From the Africa collections, we put EAP286 online, a project from Ethiopia that digitised both Muslim and Christian manuscripts. A substantial part of the collection consists of Asmat prayers, and this is an example of part of a 19th century scroll.
EAP286/1/1/38 Asmat Prayers [19th century]
To show the variety of the collection, this is the first page of an incomplete Taḫmīs al-Fayyūmī on the "Poem of the Mantle" by al-Būṣīrī.
EAP566 is an example of one of the Asian projects that went online, a very impressive collection of 18th and 19th century Urdu periodicals. The articles cover an incredibly broad range of subject matter and the accompanying illustrations are a joy to browse through, as can be seen from these pages from Nairang-i khiyal.
EAP566/1/4/10/1 Nairang-i_khiyal (Volume and Issue not known) [1932]
EAP566/1/4/10/1 Nairang-i_khiyal (Volume and Issue not known) [1932]
My final continent from the EAP worldwide whistle-stop tour, of course, is the Americas and one important project that went online was EAP563 – the archives of the engineering firm ‘Hume Brothers’ which was set up in Argentina in 1880. The company's main work consisted of planning and building thousands of kilometers of roads, not only in Argentina but also throughout Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. It is a project that contains a mixture of texts, drawings and photographs.
This is a photograph of the construction of a lift bridge over the Riachuelo in Buenos Aires.
And this example is a stereoscopic view of the San Roque Dam in Argentina.
EAP563/1/5/5/1252 San Roque Dam (Argentina). [c 1945]
But of course I must not leave out the two projects that went online this month and got us to 5 million images. The first was EAP753, a pilot project that carried out an inventory and sample digitisation of parish documents in the area of Belém do Pará, Brazil.
EAP753/1/1/4 Cairary Baptisms, n 4 [1895-1901]
and EAP541, which digitised the historical archives in the Public Records and Archives Administration (PRAAD) in Tamale, Northern Ghana. I rather liked the fact that we have records about latrines - this has to be a first for EAP!
EAP541/1/1/88: Salaga-Site for septic Tank Laterines [1952-73]
15 July 2015
New images online - July 2015
This month three projects have gone online, EAP080, EAP660 and EAP769.
The first of these projects, EAP080, microfilmed Serbian musical collections from the Craftsmen choral society in Zemun. Choral societies were a prominent part of Serbian musical culture in the 19th century. Between 1834 and 1914 over 150 Serbian choral societies were founded. Some of them had extremely rich musical libraries, with thousands of scores and choral parts. Unfortunately, only a few of them preserved their full musical collections, which often included original manuscripts. Numerous collections were lost, divided or even destroyed.
The musical collection of the Craftsmen choral society from Zemun contains 27 large boxes of material: manuscripts, handwritten and printed scores, mostly choral music, stage music as well as some documents on the history of the society. The compositions are written by Serbian, Russian, Czech, German, Austrian and Italian composers.
This collection is an excellent example of the typical musical taste of a growing citizen class. Judging by stamps and signatures, it seems as if other choirs' libraries were added and came from the Serbian Orthodox Choral Society and the Academic Choir, both from Zemun, and the Cathedral Choir from Novi Sad.
EAP080/1/8/3/4: Image 12 - Unknown author, Ukoricene crvene, plave i zelene sveske [Music note books with red, blue and green covers]
The second project this month, EAP660, digitised copies of Nur-i-Afshan, a periodical published by the Presbyterian Mission in the Punjab. Sometimes published weekly, and other times bi-monthly. Nur-i-Afshan, was a multifaceted news magazine and carried local and international news summaries, government postings, commodity prices, and advertisements, but also opinion articles, essays, proverbs, and poems.
This periodical is one of the very few primary sources originating locally in pre-partition India, which shows Christian missionary work in the Punjab. In addition to being a religious publication, Nur-i-Afshan also forms part of a large and growing corpus of Urdu periodicals published in the nineteenth century and gives the researcher invaluable insight into the thinking, concerns, and ideas of nineteenth century Indians and enables a better understanding of the social, political and religious forces at play during this period. Furthermore, the study of such periodicals is of interest to scholars engaged in linguistics and language development. As the nineteenth century was a key age in the development of the Urdu language, the styles of prose, grammar, and diction used in this publication are important research materials. The role of a missionary society in taking up a local vernacular for discourse at that time makes the importance of Nur-i-Afshan even greater and its study more significant.
EAP660/1/26/60: Image 1 - Nur-i-Afshan December [1900 volume 28 no.52] [1900]
The final project this month is EAP769, a pilot project which looked at archives and records from the Caribbean island of Montserrat, a country that has suffered from harsh environmental conditions and natural disasters. Inappropriate storage and handling has resulted in material being lost or rapidly deteriorating, creating an urgent need for proper preventive conservation care. Recent volcanic activity destroyed many of the previous storage facilities.
This project identified archival material held throughout Montserrat, assessed its condition and prepared a long term plan for its safe storage, digitisation and increased public access and awareness of this endangered resource.
The pilot project worked on the collections of original material held by the Montserrat National Trust (MNT). This comprises of 18th and 19th century estate plans and deeds; 20th century letters, newspapers, land deeds, wills, receipts; and collections of slide photographs from the 1980s, including a 1986 historic buildings survey which show many buildings no longer standing after the 1995 and 1997 volcanic eruptions.
EAP769/3/3/1: Image 1 – Historic Building Survey 1986
In addition, the project worked on some of the 18th century records held at the Central Library, a collection in private ownership, and material held by the Government Registry Office.
Sample digitisation of selected material was undertaken and is now available to view online.
EAP769/3/1/12: Image 6 - Sale of Champion Jones Properties [1910]
Check back next month to see what else has been added!
You can also keep up to date with any new collections by joining our Facebook group.
Endangered archives blog recent posts
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- New online - December 2020 and January 2021
- New Projects Online - June 2020
- New collections online - June 2019
- Call for applications now open
- New collections online - June 2017
- New collections online - January 2017
- Call for Applications