The Modern Endangered Archives Program, or MEAP, a UCLA Library initiative that expands the capacity for digital preservation around the world, has announced 26 new grants awarded to communities and archives from 21 countries.

MEAP will provide $1.47 million in grants to its sixth cohort of grantees - the most in the program's history. The selected projects will document and digitize a broad range of cultural heritage materials including: archival materials in eastern Ukraine; films in Ghana; newspapers in India; and architectural plans in Morocco. MEAP's first project in the Ivory Coast to digitize the photographic archive of Paul Kodjo, "the father of Ivorian photography," is also one of the grant winners.

The program was launched in 2018 with support from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. To date, over $5 million in grants have funded 139 projects in 57 countries.

The grants support resource digitization, as well as the training and professional development needed for local scholars to perform the archival work they envision. This year, half the awardees are receiving a second round of funding to apply the skills and knowledge they've gained to the next step in their cultural preservation projects.

Digitization efforts to safeguard materials that represent diverse voices and perspectives often excluded from the historical record are also among the winners. Several archival collections will use MEAP funds to expand and reimagine Latin American history. These collections include posters, photographs and audiovisual materials that document movements such as human rights activism in the Andean countryside of Peru, efforts to investigate cases of forced disappearances throughout Latin America, and rural responses in Brazil during a period of mass immigration.

In the six years since MEAP made its first grant to digitize and preserve at-risk materials, the Library has published more than 73,000 items on its digital collections library. The collections can now be used in the classroom to advance UCLA's teaching and learning mission.

For its next cohort of projects, MEAP is seeking applicants who are working to preserve materials from the 20th and 21st century that reflect community voices, cultural expression and historical experiences missing from dominant (or national) narratives.

Applications for the 2025 grant awards open Sept. 10 and close Nov. 15. The awards include:

• Planning grants of up to $20,000 are available for evaluating or surveying collections for digitization and/or curation for organization and inventory work.
• Project grants of up to $70,000 are available for digitizing archival content or curating assets that are already in digital form.
• New regional grants of up to $100,000 are available for creating digital collections that include cultural heritage materials from three or more institutions, families or archival repositories. Regional grants are also available to past grantees.

Read more about the new grantees and funding opportunities on the UCLA Library Modern Endangered Archives website.