The Programme is now accepting applications for the next round of funding. Detailed information on the timetable, criteria, eligibility and procedures for applying for a grant is available on the Programme’s website. The deadline for receipt of preliminary applications is 3 November 2006.

The aim is to safeguard archival material relating to societies usually at an early stage of development, ie, its normal focus is on the period of a society’s history before ‘modernisation’ or ‘industrialisation’ had generated institutional and record-keeping structures for the systematic preservation of historical records, very broadly defined. The relevant time period will therefore vary according to the society with which we deal. The Programme is completely open as to theme and regional interest, although applications concerned with non-western societies are particularly welcomed.

The Programme’s objectives are achieved principally by making a number of grants to individual researchers to locate relevant collections, to arrange their transfer to suitable local archival home where possible, and to deliver copies to the British Library and a local institution for the benefit of researchers worldwide. Pilot projects are particularly welcomed, to investigate the survival of archival collections on a particular subject, in a discrete region, or in a specific format, and the feasibility of their recovery.

For the purposes of the Programme, archives will be interpreted widely to embrace not only rare printed sources (books, serials, newspapers, ephemera, etc) and manuscripts in any language, but also visual materials (drawings, paintings, prints, posters, photographs, etc), audio or video recordings, digital data, and even other objects and artefacts – but normally only where they are found in association with a documentary archive. In all cases, the validity of archival materials for inclusion in the Programme will be assessed by their relevance as source materials for the pre-industrial stage of a society’s history.

The Programme does not offer grants to support the normal running activities of an archive, although the Programme may offer support for such items as costs directly related to the acceptance of relocated material.

The Programme is administered by the British Library and applications are considered in an annual competition by an international panel of historians and archivists.

41 projects, totalling over one million pounds, have already been granted awards since the Programme was established two years ago. For further details of these awards please visit the Programme’s website.