ARCHIVED: Completed project: Central American and Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA)

Primary UITS contacts: Jon Dunn, Will Cowan

Completed: April 1, 2010

Description: The Central American and Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA) project is funded by a four-year US Department of Education Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) grant that will allow Indiana University to create a digital archive, making accessible hundreds of hours of raw footage, videos, and films currently preserved in a precarious state. The archive will annotate, index, and deliver the footage in such a way that it may be used in college and high school classrooms throughout the US, Mexico, and Central America.

At IU, CAMVA is sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Center for the Study of History and Memory (CSHM), and the Digital Library Program. Based at IU, Project CAMVA is a consortium of three leading research institutes in Central America and Mexico: The Institute of Nicaraguan and Central American History (IHNCA, Nicaragua), The Museum of Words and Images (MUPI, El Salvador), and The Center for Advanced Research and Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS, Mexico).

Outcome and benefits: The main activity of Project CAMVA is to create a regional audio-visual archive where none exists, even at the national level. The collected, processed, and distributed materials will allow students, scholars, and policy makers to create cultural/historical benchmarks against which historical comparisons and contemporary studies can be measured. Specifically, the project in Mexico will focus on videos and raw footage collected through years of anthropological studies at CIESAS dealing with the indigenous peoples, mainly of Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas. In Nicaragua, Project CAMVA will work with IHNCA in preserving and making accessible rapidly deteriorating videos, films, and raw video footage stored at the Universidad Centroamericana, the Centro de Historia Militar (Center of Military History), as well as footage from television companies. Most of the videos and television footage deal with rural conditions and conflict during the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, in El Salvador, Project CAMVA will select and process materials from the vast MUPI collection, containing over sixty reels of film, dealing in large part with the rural-based guerrilla struggle of the 1970s and 1980s among the eastern Salvadoran peasantry of mestizo, indigenous, and hybrid identities. The fact that all of these collections, rich in cultural and historical material, are imminently perishable is the single, most compelling rationale for the project.

Current status: In August 2009, a conference was held in Mexico City for all three partner institutions that are currently digitizing video content from their collections. The partner institutions, using multilingual versions of the EVIA Annotator's Workbench and Controlled Vocabulary Maintenance Tool, finished up the annotation of the videos. Working with the IU Libraries Cataloging Division, we have begun the process of cataloging the videos so that the individual files are available through IUCAT.

Client impact: In addition to the Co-PDs listed below, this project benefits faculty members at IU involved in various humanities and social sciences disciplines.

UITS project sponsor: Craig Stewart, Associate Dean, Research Technologies

IU project team:

• Jeff Gould
• Michael Grove
• Carol Glaze
• Jon Dunn
• Will Cowan
• Jenn Riley
• Michelle Dalmau

Additional information

• Co-Project Directors: Jeff Gould, John Bodnar, Daniel James
• Funding agency: US Department of Education
• Grant dates: October 1, 2005-September 30, 2009
• Funding to UITS: $0
• Total funding to IU related to this project: $600,000