Welcome to the Archives, Memory, and Preservation Lab, a laboratory for research and learning in the Center for Latin American and Iberian Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
AMPL develops tools and methodologies for achieving a more egalitarian archiving practice in Latin America and beyond.
A digital archive with no servers: tens of thousands of historical documents, millions of image tiles, and sophisticated search and filtering — all as static files.
Zasqua is an open-source platform for hosting and discovering large collections of digitized historical documents. It currently holds over 104,000 descriptions from five repositories in Colombia and Peru. More details
An open-source visual narrative framework for scholars, students, and communities working with digitised objects.
An open-source framework for building interactive visual narratives around digitised objects, built on minimal computing principles and free to use. More details
A Blueprint for Egalitarian Archival Practices
A collaborative project bringing students and scholar practitioners to think about archives, social memory, and how to activate the past. More details
An NEH-funded project to develop an integrated toolkit of hardware, software, and documentation to allow lower-resourced institutions, collectives, and communities to digitize their archival collections at low cost.
What happens when communities have the means to digitize and administer their own historical documentation? What if more people can decide what constitutes an archive: what is worth collecting, preserving, and sharing, and on what terms? How might this affect how visions and narratives of the past are written and taught in different contexts? More details
Building object-based digital narratives for audiences beyond the academy.
A digital narrative investigating a 16th-century khipu in UCSB's Art, Design & Architecture Museum through material, haptic, and digital imaging methods. More details
Help us catalogue historical materials from Latin America
Learn how to read 16th and 17th-century manuscripts from Tunja, Colombia, and help us make them available to researchers, students, and the public. More details
A project to develop a digital archive and historical dataset useful to Andean communities
How can we make digital archives of historical documents useful to the communities reflected in them? (Photographs by the French Institute of Andean Studies and Evelyne Mesclier) More details
A project to digitize and preserve two archives documenting urban migration and political struggles in Medellín, Colombia.
As part of this work, UCSB undergrads digitized an archive of photographs of everyday life in the tugurios of Medellín, Colombia, taken in 1976 by Anne Tuzman and Glenn McNatt and preserved by Anne Fischel. More details