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]