Endangered Archives Programme (British Library)

The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) is a grant-making and digital archive initiative administered by the British Library in London since 2004, with financial support from the Arcadia Fund. Its mission is to preserve culturally important archives around the world that face destruction, neglect, or physical deterioration through digitisation.

EAP awards grants to researchers to digitise archives in situ — original materials never leave their country of origin. Every funded project must involve at least one local archival partner, provide training for local staff, and leave digitisation equipment in the country, ensuring lasting local capacity. Covered materials include manuscripts, rare printed sources, photographs, and audio recordings in all languages and scripts up to the early 20th century.

The programme's digital collections now encompass over 7 million images and 25,000 sound files drawn from Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Caribbean, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Digital copies are deposited in repositories in the country of origin and made freely available online by the British Library.

An innovation supporting endangered or at-risk archival digitisation, multilingual metadata, or capacity-building in heritage preservation would be directly relevant to EAP's core mandate of safeguarding irreplaceable cultural records globally.