Welcome to the Endangered Archives Programme
Unless action is taken now, much of mankind’s documentary heritage may vanish - discarded as no longer of relevance or left to deteriorate beyond recovery. This website explains what the Endangered Archives Programme is, and how it can help.
Learn about the threat to archives.
Find out more about the scope of the Programme.
Search the Endangered Archives Programme's projects.
Browse the Programme's digital collections.
Grants may be awarded to individual researchers to identify collections that can be preserved for fruitful use. The original archives and the master digital copies will be transferred to a safe archival home in their country of origin, while copies will be deposited at the British Library for use by scholars worldwide.
The Endangered Archives Programme is generously sponsored by Arcadia.
What's New
- The latest digital collections now online include Hakku Patras (performance rights) from Andhra Pradesh in India; the Matsieng Royal Archives in Lesotho; 18th and 19th century documents from Grenada; and Buddhist manuscripts from Dambadarjaa Monastery in Mongolia
- Read about the latest projects to be funded, including 19th century survey maps in Bangladesh, locating and digitising manuscripts in Uzbekistan, surveying the National Archives of Burundi, ecclesiastical documents in Colombia, and late 19th/early 20th century photographs in Lebanon.
- Read about the EAP project digitising manuscripts in Timbuktu’s twin city of Djenné in Mali. Listen to the discussion broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves about the libraries in Timbuktu and a broader discussion about book culture and literacy in Africa, including the work of EAP.
- Since the autumn of 2012, project EAP054 has been the subject of a PhD research project carried out by Ewa Majczak. Ewa is based at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the British Library, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She will be carrying out research in Cameroon.
- Read the article published in the journal 'Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa', authored by the grantholders of project EAP265 on the ‘Tifinagh’ rock inscriptions of the Tadrart Acacus mountains, in SW Libya.
- Read about some of the issues encountered and overcome during an EAP project to digitise materials held at the Fundamental Scientific Library, Armenia.
- Watch a video from the Buddhist archive of photography in Luang Prabang, Laos.
- Listen to a report on Dr Tuchscherer's Bamum project in Cameroon, broadcast on the BBC World Service radio programme 'The Strand'.
- Read about EAP in the news:
The New York Times
Simon Fraser University