Crowdfunding African Culture & Libraries! What is T160K? And What Can You Do to Help?

by Naomi House, MLIS
updated 11/17/14 & originally published 12/13/14

What is T160K? And What Can You Do to Help?

T160k Timbuktu manuscript green

Back in February I presented on a panel at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa. I was incredibly excited to be placed on the community building panel with Dr. Stephanie Diakité, who was deeply involved in the work to preserve the rescued Timbuktu manuscripts including the highly successful Indiegogo campaign, Libraries in Exile. Preservation efforts for the very delicate and fragile parchment and velum included fundraising through an organization Stephanie founded called T160K, for moisture traps, archival boxes, and the additional footlockers required to safely store these manuscripts, as well as to cover the significant labor effort required to unbox and re-pack the manuscripts for preservation.

Stephanie and I got to talking about the amazing communities of librarians, preservationist and archivists that we both knew as well as the many potential projects and partners for other projects across Africa that Stephanie knew about and we decided to form a social purpose corporation dedicated to creating a crowdfunding platform for donations to vetted African culture, heritage and patrimony projects beyond and including the manuscripts.

I am excited to announce that we just launched the crowdfunding site at T160K.org!

Sounds fantastic, right? So what will be on the site? What projects will you see and can donate to and how can you help?  Great questions!T160K collage dance art music circus Oct 2014

What Projects Will be On T160K.org at Launch?

Currently we have several projects / partners signed up at launch including cataloging the Timbuktu rescued manuscripts in Mali, the Circus Debre Berhan in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Fendika Cultural Club in Ethiopia and West African / Mali Instruments 4 Africa.

  

What Can You Do?

SOCIAL MEDIA:  Share with your networks our link and the launch date. Let them know we are new crowdfunding platform for African art, culture, archives, dance, heritage and more!  Add us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and even Ello

TWEET:  I am looking to get the word out to journalists. “Are you a blogger / journalist or know one who would be interested in interviewing our team about T160K? Email naomi@t160K.org Please share”  and follow us @T160K  @T160KNaomi and @T160KTony

INTERVIEW US: Do you have a blog? Are you a journalist?  We would love to do an interview with you! Email naomi@t160k.org for details!

EMAIL:  Email naomi@t160k.org to sign up for updates and to find out how you can help!

DONATE: Once we launch you can help by donating time to get the word out about the individual campaigns as well as donating money.

 

Thank you once again for your time and interest in this project. I am CMO of T160K and founder of INALJ. I appreciate your support. Library and LIS folks are the BEST!

 

Originally entitled What is T160K? And What Can You Do to Help? 

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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