We are now in the third and final year of a three-year $165,000 grant to document and conduct a records survey of the Jamaican and Trinidadian communities of Brooklyn. Funds began to flow in January 2001 with the hiring of a project archivist and an assistant archivist. The grant (authored by Archivist Anthony Cucchiara) was made by the State of New York via a competitive program run by the Metropolitan New York Reference and Research Library Agency (METRO).
Project manager Chantel Bell and her assistant Deslyn Downs are presently hard at work wrapping up the present project and identifying funding sources that might permit its continuation. Professor Cucchiara and Associate Archivist Marianne LaBatto have written an excellent proposal, The Caribbean Collection: An Archival Records Survey of West Indian New York.
During the spring 2002, Ms. LaBatto and Ms. Bell used their experiences to organize and present two workshops, Documenting the Underdocumented, one on April 9, 2002, at METRO headquarters in Manhattan, the other on April 29, 2002 at the White Plains Public Library.
One provision of the grant requires that Ms. LaBatto serve as a consultant to archives and libraries in the metropolitan area on the topic of records surveys. As part of this commitment, last winter she and Conservator Slava Polishchuk visited the Pilsudski Institute of America http://www.pilsudski.org/English/Institute/Welcome.htm, one of the most important Polish archives that exists outside of Poland. There, they toured and made recommendations for the processing of records that were saved during the Soviet takeover of Poland that followed WWII. A copy of Ms. LaBatto's report was sent to the Polish National Archives http://www.archiwa.gov.pl/index.eng.html. To assist in the management of their data and activities, staff working on the Jamaican and Trinidadian project have created two databases. The first contains survey findings, the second contact information. The staff have also generated templates that are used in conducting interviews; these ensure that both scope notes and historical information are collected and organized in a uniform and logical fashion.
As the project has grown, so has its Web site, now indexed by Google http://www.google.com and linked to by the UNESCO Archives Portal http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_archives/pages/index.shtml and the Virtual Institute of Caribbean Studies http://pw1.netcom.com/~hhenke/.