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.
Source: UC Davis
Walker recently was awarded a $50,000 grant from the UCLA Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program, or MEAD, 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 MEAD’s second round of funding. MEAD 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.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
