Historians to Digitize Endangered Peruvian Archive
By Kathleen Holder, content strategist, College of Letters and Science
"For years, the historical papers of a Peruvian peasants’ rights group sat heaped in piles on the floor of a house in downtown Lima — threatened by pests, political foes, thieves and natural disasters, but largely off limits to scholars and the public.
A new project led by UC Davis historian Charles Walker will digitize documents of the Peruvian Peasant Confederation (Confederación Campesina del Perú, or CCP) and make them accessible online.
Walker recently was awarded a $50,000 grant from the UCLA Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program, or MEAP, to buy imaging and other equipment, and pay part-time salaries of a team of Peruvian archivists who began organizing and creating an inventory of the papers in 2015.
The project is among 22 worldwide that were selected in August for MEAP’s second round of funding. MEAP was set up in 2018 with support from Arcadia, a charitable trust of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to digitize and document 20th- and 21st-century community activism and cultural heritage."