SCOLMA Conference 2008

Last week’s SCOLMA conference focused on two projects, the Endangered Archives and Endangered Languages projects.

The Endangered Archives Programme, funded by Arcadia (formerly the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Trust) provides grants, administered by the British Library, to safeguard archival material at threat of being lost or destroyed. Archives have been defined widely to include rare printed sources (books, serials, newspapers, ephemera, etc.), manuscripts in any language, visual materials (drawings, paintings, prints, posters, photographs, etc.), audio or video recordings, digital data, and other objects and artefacts - but normally only where they are found in association with a documentary archive. The programme provides pilot project grants to investigate, survey collections and assess the feasibility of projects, as well as major research project grants which provide for surrogate copying and cataloguing of collections.

We heard from two projects that had been funded – David Zeitlyn talked about archiving a Cameroonian photographic studio; that of the studio photographer Jacques Touselle, with a collection of about 40,000 negatives; and Dr Siddig Elzailaee, discussed the endangered archives of Sudanese trade unions, 1899-2005. Both projects were extremely interesting and the talks revealed the risks archive collections face, as well as the richness of the content made available through these projects. Other countries in which projects have been funded include Tuvalu, Nigeria, India, East Timor, Cameroon, Ghana, Tanzania, Nevis, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Jamaica. Details of the programme and projects funded can be accessed at http://www.bl.uk/endangeredarchives

The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, also funded by Arcadia, is hosted at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. Presentations by Prof Peter K. Austin and Dr Friederike Luepke, gave an overview of current research on endangered languages, and a case study of the Bainouk language in Senegal. It was enlightening to hear how attitudes to languages, the social spheres in which languages are used, and trends towards moving to cities impacted on indigenous and ancestral languages. The website for the project is available at: http://www.hrelp.org