By June Carolyn Erlick

Special to the Gazette

Somewhere in Latin America, there's a funky little archive out in the middle of nowhere with a leaking roof.

Actually, says Widener Library Latin American specialist Dan Hazen, there are a lot of those libraries and archives scattered throughout Latin America. And it doesn't take a fortune to repair the roof or build some shelves or get a small computer to systematize a valuable collection.

That's why the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given more than $400,000 to support a four-year program of small grants for Latin American libraries and archives. The grant is administered through the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies under Hazen's direction.

The individual grants are small, about $20,000 maximum. The first grant was awarded to a photographic collection in Chile's National Archives. The collection contains about 250,000 photos from the archives of a defunct newspaper from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

The deadlines for grant applications are three times a year, in May, September, and December. The first grant was awarded barely after the paperwork was completed for the Mellon project. But now, grant applications are rolling in. March winners include church archives from Campeche, Mexico, and Lima, Peru; the municipal archive in Granada, Nicaragua; a photographic archive in Yucatan, Mexico; a departmental archive in Cuzco, Peru, and the national archives of Peru.

Hazen, whose official title is Librarian for Latin America, Spain, and Portugal in the Widener Library of Harvard College Library, notes that the grants particularly favor historical materials. Technology will often be a component of the small grants, since many Latin American libraries are lacking even one computer to keep track of their collections. Small institutions will be favored over better-established institutions, although the program does not exclude them.

The idea for the Mellon grant grew out of a project by Spain's Fundación Histórica Tavera, which has given a few small individual grants to Latin American archives and was seeking some like-minded organization in the United States with which to build a coalition. Ignacio de Larramendi, a retired Spanish insurance executive, made historical materials a passion and set up the organization to (among other things) pull together information on archival holdings throughout Latin America. In the process, his teams found some very basic needs and started giving small amounts of money, for instance, to help the municipal archive in Puno, Peru.

Don Ignacio got in touch with Norman Fiering, director of the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, which houses a large collection of Latin American colonial materials. As a result, the first meeting of interested parties came together at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York.

"Everyone had done research in Latin America, and everyone told favorite tales of what library was in horrible shape," recounts Hazen.

That's when the group, most of whom had an affinity for "funky little libraries," found out how widespread the problems are.

Hazen, for instance, did his dissertation research on the social history of Puno in 1971-72. He returned several years later on a Fulbright scholarship to make a bibliographic listing of local newspapers and other journals from the period 1880-1950. He found that a Maoist-inspired local administration in Juliaca, a town near Puno, had rotated jobs among all municipal employees. One year, town authorities were looking for stuffing for the oversized dummies to be burnt in Carnival bonfires. With no one to object, the dummies were filled with back issues of Juliaca's major newspaper.

"The collection was gone," recounts Hazen with an obvious trace of sadness in his voice.

And then there was that North American graduate student who was studying records from expropriated coastal sugar plantations in Peru. The fellow, who had a "strong sense of solidarity with exploited workers," decided to destroy records of worker malfeasance because they told the wrong story.

"The dangers to archives aren't necessarily always because of a lack of money," warns Hazen.

Still, the small grants help to institutionalize collections and, in that way, perhaps discourage behavior that devalues the importance of documents. But, as the historians and librarians sat around the table, it became apparent that mice and mold were more of a menace to the hemisphere's libraries than Maoists.

The Mellon grant, an outgrowth of this initial meeting, was awarded last spring. The Mellon Foundation concerns itself with the big picture, the neediness of many Latin American libraries and archives. The advisory committee for the Mellon project, which allocates the grants, is made up of Ken Andrien, history professor at the Ohio State University and the first chair of the Committee on Archives of the Conference on Latin American History; John Coatsworth, DRCLAS director and Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs; Norman Fiering, director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library; Dan Hazen, committee chairman; Deborah Jakubs, Ibero-American bibliographer at Duke University and Associate Director of the Duke-University of North Carolina Program in Latin American Studies; and Herbert Klein, history professor at Columbia University.

The individual grants will sometimes be used to preserve endangered materials, particularly through preservation microfilming or (occasionally) digitalization. The grants can also offer short-term, specific technical assistance to improve operations and services such as one-time environmental assessments or evaluations of locally-produced microfilm to ensure conformance to international standards.

There will be other specific projects to improve access and service by preparing collection guides or finding aids, or by cataloging holdings. And some grants will be for things like windowshades and shelving, dehumidifiers and fans, and replacement parts for equipment -- things that might seem elemental but that are basic to the survival of books and documents.

Then, there's the possibility of training opportunities such as attendance at workshops or short courses in library or archival administration, preservation, bibliographic control, and electronic information technologies.

These are all different ways of preserving materials that are "unique, scarce, or in danger," says Hazen.

The end result should be that there will be slightly fewer funky libraries in the middle of nowhere with leaking roofs.