Jacqueline Hayden and Rachel Beckwith present on the Havana Archive Project
Jacqueline Hayden, Professor Emerita of Film and Photography and Director of the Havana Archive Project, and I recently had the fun opportunity to present on the Havana Archive Project at the Art Library Society of North America’s annual conference (it would have been in Montreal, but instead was virtual- darn!). You can find the Havana Archive Project photographs now as part of our Five College Digital Library.
Professor Hayden and I were part of a panel of speakers for the session below.
(Session 26) Tracing the Past III – International Perspectives on Photo Archives documenting the Transformation of Cultural-Heritage Sites
Thursday 13-May-21 | 11:10 AM – 12:30 PM
Speaker(s):
Rachel Beckwith – Hampshire College
Bettina Smith – Image Collections & Fieldwork Archives
Stephanie Caruso – Postdoctoral Fellow in Byzantine Art and Archaeology, Dumbarton Oaks
Stefano Anastasio – Archaeologist, Soprintendenza di Firenze
Lavina Ciuffa – Photographic Archive Curator, American Academy in Rome
Jacqueline Hayden – Professor Emerita of Film and Photography and Director of the Havana Archive Project; Project Director of PRAHA, Puerto Rico Architectural Heritage Archive
Moderator(s):
Spyros Koulouris – Tatti The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies
Isotta Poggi – Getty Research Institute
Our session is described here:
The Havana Archive Project: A Project of Perseverance
Just over a year ago at the start of 2020, the Hampshire College Library launched the Havana Archive Project, an Open Access digital photographic archive containing over 8,000 photographs of the 1,055 most significant buildings in the Historic Center of Havana, Cuba (as determined by Dr. Eusebio Leal, Director of the Office of the Historian) at the beginning of the restoration of Havana in the early 1980s.
Begun in 2012, the project was a collaboration between Jacqueline Hayden, Professor Emerita of Film and Photography, and students from Hampshire College with Plan Maestro, Office of the Historian. The digital archive is hosted by the Five College Compass: Digital Collections and the Center for Research Libraries.
The Center for Research Libraries’ Latin American Materials Project (LAMP) awarded Hampshire College a grant back in 2015 to create metadata and complete the digitization of the thousands of photographs documenting these buildings (declared World Heritage Monuments by UNESCO in 1982) in the center of Havana.
This presentation will talk about the timeline of the project, how many collaborators it took to come to fruition, and then a case study in how the Havana Archive Project was used in a class at Hampshire College in the fall of 2020.
Speakers: Rachel Beckwith and Jacqueline Hayden
View the full Session Abstract and Schedule Here
And, below are some photos from the slide deck (all credit to Jacqueline Hayden) from Professor Hayden’s talk so you can see the sites in Havana, the workspace with scanners and cameras, some negatives, and Professor Hayden and her colleagues.
