We were delighted in November 2000 when the Brooklyn College Archives received 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).
We are now in the second fiscal year of this three year project for which the initial Project Coordinator Yasmin Haug laid the administrative and structural groundwork. On October 10, 2001, archivist Chantell Bell succeeded Ms. Haug. In the summer 2001 a library school student from the University of the West Indies joined the project for a six-week internship.
The project Web site debuted March 2, 2001. As the project grows, so does its Web site, now indexed by both AltaVista http://www.altavista.com and 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/ .
The first meeting of the Project Advisory Committee occurred February 28, 2001. Board members like Council Members Lloyd Henry and Una Clark have supplied us with many profitable contacts. These include:
| Gail Yvette Davis | Economist native to Trinidad and Tobago, active in the Brooklyn Caribbean community |
| Gail P. Guy | Deputy Consul, Consulate General of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago |
| Basil K. Bryan | Consul General, Consulate General of Jamaica |