In January 2011, Columbia University Libraries / IS received a seven-year, $1 million grant from the International Fellowship Program of the Ford Foundation to become the permanent home for its archives. The collection will include both paper and digital archives and will be made available to researchers worldwide.
The IFP has since 2001 offered fellowships for post-graduate study to leaders from underserved communities in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Russia, and will complete its work in 2014. Their archives include documentation and videos of the more than 3,300 IFP fellows who passed through the program as well as comprehensive planning and adminstrative files.
The completed IFP archive at Columbia will be of great interest to researchers and practitioners interested in the progress of social justice, community development, and access to higher education. Access to the paper and electronic archives will be integrated, offering researchers a fast and comprehensive way to study the content.
One of the key objectives of the grant is to enable Columbia Libraries to build out a full set of repository-based systems and services so that it can more easily acquire, ingest, process, preserve and make accessible both the paper and born-digital organizational records. The technological infrastructure built for this project will ultimately allow Columbia act as the central respository for the electronic records of other institutions whose archives are deposited at Columbia.
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