IU’s Liberian Collections Project Awarded Two British Library Grants
Liberian Collections Project—Archives of Traditional Music
Indiana University
News Release
July 21, 2005
An important new collection of historical Liberian documents will soon be accessible to students and scholars in Liberia and the international academic community. The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme has awarded two grants to the Liberian Collections Project of the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University to restore and microfilm the papers of the late President W.V.S. Tubman and to conduct pilot studies at the National Archives and the Presidential Archives. The grants are supplemented by additional support from the Africana Librarians Council for these preservation and microfilming projects. These grants arose from a 2004 trip to assess the condition of Liberian historical documents and archives after nearly twenty-five years of civil strife.
O ne August morning in 2004, a caretaker ushered a Liberian and an American researcher into the abandoned library of an unoccupied country mansion in Liberia. There they hoped to find the personal papers of William V. S. Tubman, Liberia’s longest serving President (1944-1971), described as historically significant twenty-five years earlier in a report prepared for Tubman’s widow by Christopher Clapham, an African specialist now at Cambridge University. The Liberian scholar had seen the papers in late 1980 and later heard that they still existed.
The Tubman papers were found that morning, still in the library of the Tubman estate, but in a deteriorating condition. During Liberia’s most recent civil war in 2003, Taylor’s soldiers rummaged through the file cabinets in search of valuables, tossing folders and papers onto the floor, leaving them limp and damp in Liberia’s tropical climate. These papers required immediate conservation measures, followed by restoration of their organization and microfilming for long-term preservation.
On July 24, 2005, the Liberian scholar, Dr. D. Elwood Dunn, a former Liberian government official and now a Professor of Political Science at Sewanee–The University of the South (Tennessee), along with the American researcher, Dr. Verlon Stone, Project Coordinator, Indiana University Liberian Collections Project, and Mr. Jacob Nadal, Head of the E. Lingle Craig Preservation Laboratory, Indiana University Libraries will arrive in Liberia. They will work cooperatively with the staff of the Liberian Center for National Documents and Records/ National Archives to restore and preserve the W.V.S. Tubman papers
The joint team will retrieve and pack the papers for shipment to Indiana University. There preservation specialists will use techniques designed to preserve fragile papers, including deep freezing at -10º F and freeze-drying. The IU team will restore and microfilm the papers and return them to Liberia along with microfilm copies for the University of Liberia, Cuttington University College and other institutions of higher learning.
The second grant awarded by British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is for pilot studies to survey and sample the holdings of Presidential Archives and National Archives, each of which holds invaluable and irreplaceable materials for understanding Liberia’s history. Key document series will be located, assessed, and selected for future preservation.
Web Links:
For further information on the Endangered Archives Programme’s Liberian projects:
W.V.S. Tubman Papers at http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/vstone.html
Nat ional & Presidential Archives at http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/stone.html
For further information on IU’s Liberian materials:
OnLiberia.Org web site www.onliberia.org