On Friday, June 3, 2016 the UC-Mexico
Initiative Mission project exploratory meeting held at the Huntington Library.
Twenty-four participants representing libraries, archives, museums,
preservation and conservation education, and other cultural heritage programs
from both the United States, Mexico, and at least four indigenous nations
(Acjachemen, Tongva, Ohlone, Chemeheuvi) to explore the potential for a
multinational partnership to document the history and cultural, historic, and
ecological impact of the missions along El Camino Real from Baja California Sur
(Mexico) through Baja California (Mexico) up to Alta California (United
States).
The framing effort for this project is a bi-national effort
to receive UNESCO World Heritage Status for El Camino Real de las Californias
(see: http://californiamissionsfoundation.org/traveling-el-camino-real/
), as described by INAH's
Director of World Heritage, Dr. Francisco Javier López Morales.
The most critical needs identified at the meetings include
the (1) creation of a union catalog of the books, monographs, artwork, and
realia associated with the missions. All of these materials are at risk
throughout the missions, and the rate at which the monographs and manuscripts
held by the missions are disappearing is alarming; (2) the physical
preservation/conservation of the missions and their cultural artifacts; and (3)
the protection of the missions as cultural heritage sites.
Since the UC Libraries have both a history of creating and
contributing to union catalogs as well as working with a variety of descriptive
metadata standards (e.g. Melvyl; OAC; Calisphere; the Center for
Bibliographical Studies and Research’s projects such as ESTC, CCILA; etc.), the
UC-Mexico Mission Project would like to build on that expertise. Specifically,
the Project partners are looking to the UC Libraries to provide leadership,
expertise, methodologies, infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance of a union
catalog.
One goal of the project is to include site- and
culturally-specific information about the individual missions, the different
indigenous communities that interacted or were associated with each mission,
and the unique impact that each mission had on the landscape, culture, and
history of each region.
Digitization (or digitalización in Spanish) is of interest
as a long-term goal but is not the most immediate pressing issue. Concerns were
expressed about the expense of digitization; long-term strategies to establish
sustainable funding to maintain digital collections were identified as
necessary before wholesale digitization is contemplated.
