Report of Symposium and Recommendations - February 2021

In April 2020, the authors, CLIR Fellows in the second cohort of Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, virtually convened Capacity Assessment of Latin American and Caribbean Partners: A Symposium about Open-Access, Technological Needs, and Institutional Sustainability. Originally the symposium was meant to take place in person in Miami, Florida, at Florida International University’s Frost Art Museum and the Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami Beach. Because of Covid-19, the symposium took place in a virtual format hosted by the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). The symposium centered the voices of a group of institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean by providing a forum for these stakeholders to share strategies and identify common areas of need. In taking this approach we, as organizers, intended to step outside the neoliberal model of postcustodial archiving (Alpert-Abrams et al. 2019) and create an opportunity for digital archiving and cultural preservation to be driven by archives, libraries, and scholars in Latin America and the Caribbean. The recommendations in this report for working with archives and libraries in the region were formulated by these stakeholders based on the needs of and the particular challenges faced in their respective regions. Our goal was for these stakeholders to formulate a set of questions for funders, libraries, archives, and others based in the United States, Canada, or European nations to consider when evaluating grant proposals for digital projects, or when considering post-custodial archival work with institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Recordings from the virtual event were easily made widely available to libraries, archives, and funders, thus advancing knowledge and equitable practices for working with Latin American and Caribbean archives, libraries, and cultural heritage institutions. We sought to develop recommendations and equitable practices to enhance cultural engagement through collection development that fully acknowledges Latin American and Caribbean organizations as equal partners with a voice in decision making for projects and grant funding. It is our intent that this virtual symposium serve as a model to strengthen and diversify collections, as well as promote inclusion through the active preservation of historical and contemporary documents and voices.