Biblioteca Amazonica

Literature

WHO: Amanda Smith, Antonio Franco.

WHAT: Assist the faculty research team and a team in Peru with ongoing work with the Biblioteca Amazónica to digitize its collections and equip regional archives with the tools and skills they need for prevention and preservation work. We fine-tune and finalize metadata, prepare bilingual resource guides to be distributed in the local community, a social media campaign to promote the digital collections, orient people on how to use them, and compile best practices for team members to train personnel in the Iquitos area.

WHY: Academics in the Global North have long relied on archives and libraries in the Global South to conduct their research, and many of these institutions are in increasingly precarious conditions due to limited budgets, political instability, and climate change-related disasters. This project’s resources serve to create digital files of valuable Amazonian resources available open access to all, in the local community and beyond, outside of the library’s limited hours of operation. It also works to train community members in the basics of object digitization, including scanning, editing, and generating metadata, preparing them to provide training to other area archives and libraries. Essentially, the grant takes resources from the Global North and uses them to target some of the asymmetries in knowledge production, dissemination, and cataloging.

WHAT'S NEXT: Antonio has been diligently working to complete metadata during the spring. For the rest of spring and summer, he will finalize metadata and shift to creating resource guides and copy for our social media campaign to raise awareness about the digital collections.

THE WOW: Antonio started on this project with me not really knowing what metadata was. Now, he is an expert in generating bibliographic metadata according to international library standards–in both Spanish and English!