Collaboration Across Borders

This presentation will describe a digitization partnership between the San Diego State University (SDSU) Library, the SDSU Center for Regional Sustainability, and the Archivo Histórico de Tijuana, housed within the Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura (IMAC). The collaboration addresses IMAC's desire to make their diverse and unique holdings more accessible online to the public and SDSU's desire to increase access to these unique holdings while respecting the needs and autonomy of the Archivo. Their unique and important holdings include photographs and papers documenting history and evolution of the US-Mexico border region. This presentation will also address the challenges and opportunities associated with an international collaboration, including the administrative issues such as contracting and paying for work in another country, the human issues of working respectfully in the archives of a foreign city, securing funding for international projects, creating and displaying metadata in multiple languages, and developing our digital repository based on the open source software Archipelago. The presentation will include the perspectives of both the Tijuana team and the SDSU team and outline our plans and hopes for sustaining the partnership and encouraging community engagement. The presentation will showcase the online Tijuana collections and invite feedback.