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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.

Digitization Toolkit

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

Collaborative cataloging

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

Memories of the City

A bilingual (English/Spanish) virtual exhibition that explores memory, urban migration, and political struggles in Medellín, Colombia, on the basis of two archives.

As part of this work, we are digitizing 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

Digital Storytelling

Building digital infrastructure for object-based storytelling beyond the academy.

A prototype platform and methodology that will allow scholars to present expert narratives aimed at different audiences through the display of born-digital or digitized objects, whether historical manuscripts, images, video or audio recordings, or 3D visualizations. More details