“The voices of the grandmothers” is a project that aims to (1) restore, (2) create metadata, (3) preserve and (4) open the access to a collection of audio interviews made to mothers of disappeared, at the same time grandmothers of appropriated children during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. The content of this collection is 144 interviews made between 1998 and 2006 to 126 mothers/grandmothers that live in different parts of the country. They were taken by the oral history archive of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the Family Biographical Archive, in order to deliver them to their grandchildren once they were found and restored. In their interviews, each one of these women reconstruct the life story of their disappeared children, the story of their family -before and after the disappearance- and talk about the search for their grandchildren. Listening to their voices, we can see how they experienced the state terrorism and its consequences differently. Considering the particular circumstances of their lives, their stories, their families, the places where they live, among other factors, each one of these testimonies opens us to their most personal and intimate universe where the absence has a main part.

Through this project, our objective is to guarantee the conservation and allow open access to these fundamental voices of our history. For this, we will start by restoring the physical support of the interviews, the audio cassettes, and moving them to a storage room with the appropriate conditions for their conservation. Second, we plan to digitize them in a high-quality format. Third, organize and create administrative and access metadata for the collection and each interview (audio and transcription) following audio-visual archival criteria. And finally, with the restored audios of the interviews, create a digital exhibition available online on the web page of our organization for all interested public.

NOTE:  This proposal was submitted to LARRP, which referred it to LAMP for consideration.