1. EAP 1024: Beyond the Revolution: Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Frères de l’Instruction Chrétienne Collections, Bringing Nineteenth-Century Haitian History to the World
A Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) Collaboration
Dr. Erin Zavitz, University of Montana Western

2. Digital Library of the Caribbean
44 partners and counting
Over 3 million pages, representing 133,895 items: 
Over 3 million views each month:  and 96 million page views since 2006

3. Founded in 1912
Second oldest library in Haiti
Repository for almost 10,000 documents and over two hundred newspapers, photos, and stamps
dLOC partner

4. EAP Project Scope of Project 19th century newspapers
Over 90 titles that span from 1820s-1890s
Many currently out of circulation due to fragile condition of papers
Goals
To assess state of newspapers
Identify those that can be digitized
Digitize titles
Catalog
Updates
Have identified over 30 titles and started digitizing and cataloging
~1TB so far
Team
In Haiti
Marie-France Guillaume, BHFIC Director
Wandred Pierre, Technician
Angerlo Mondésir, Technician
Dr. Lewis Clorméus, Université d’État d’Haïti
In U.S.
Dr. Anne Eller, Yale
Dr. Claire Payton, Duke/UVA
Dr. Erin Zavitz, University of Montana Western
The papers date from 1813 to 1900, a period when Haiti, just emerging from a revolution that ended slavery, was organised into an agricultural society with considerable distance between town residents and its peasant majority. At present, a rich and expanding international scholarship engages with the central impact of the Haitian Revolution ( ), an event that was integral to other Atlantic revolutions and slave societies and the foundations of modernity itself. In sharp contradistinction to this rich body of research, however, scholarship on Haiti’s history after the revolution declines precipitously, creating a catastrophic gap. There is not a single English-language work that systematically considers state making in Haiti from the 1810s through the 1870s. Sources are at the heart of this lacuna. Due to high publication costs in Haiti in the nineteenth century, book production was limited and newspapers provided the central forum for intellectual production in the newly independent state. Yet these sources remain widely unavailable, and their long-term future is in doubt.
This newspaper collection documents a period in Haitian history that scholars have yet to fully explore -- precisely because of the dearth of materials and limited access to what sources do exist. The papers in this collection span much of the nineteenth century, from 1813 to While the majority of the papers have short runs of two to three years, at least three papers had a longer publishing history: Le Télégraphe ( ), Feuille de Commerce, ( ) and Le Moniteur Haïtien ( with gaps). In contrast to the majority of available materials from this period that are published exclusively in Port-au-Prince, these periodicals represent journalism from cities and towns throughout the territory, from the south (Les Cayes) to important political centres in port towns of the north (Cap-Haïtien). The geographic range of these papers will bring to light a period of Haitian history where intellectual production was distributed throughout the country, rather than concentrated almost entirely in the Haitian capital.

5. Training and set up in November 2017 with dLOC director Miguel Asencio, FIU

6. Two camera stands
Adobe Lightroom

7. Samples from BHFIC
Le Réveil, 1893
Feuille du Commerce,
L’Union, 1889

8. Next Steps
May 16, 11am-12pm: Présentation du projet British Library (French)
Presenter: Marie-France Guillaume, Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Frères de l'Instruction Chrétienne
(Facilitator: Dr. Hélène Huet)
ZOOM: