The Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) is a collaborative post-custodial archival project aimed at preserving and promoting the use of fragile human rights records from around the world. HRDI was established at the University of Texas Libraries with a generous grant from the Bridgeway Foundation in 2008. Additionally, HRDI has partnered with the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice to identify key strategic issues for the initiative, as well as to provide relevant programming to the UT community and beyond.
HRDI is broad in scope, with collections from Rwanda, Burma, Europe, Central America, and the United States. HRDI preserves and provides access to paper-based collections, as well as digitized and born-digital audiovisual collections. Recognizing the fragility of human rights web content, HRDI also maintains an archive of websites related to human rights issues.
In addition to the HRDI collections available on this site, the University of Texas is home to a number of human rights collections and resources available to researchers and the public. Latin American Digital Initiatives, a repository similar to the HRDI and focused on Latin America, launched in 2014 and holds several human rights-related collections. For a more complete list of human rights materials and resources at the University of Texas, please consult this LibGuide.
A number of the collections found on this site have been preserved and made available through post-custodial archival collaborations between HRDI and partner organizations and repositories. Post-custodialism is a collaborative, non-extractive, mutualistic approach to providing access to archival collections within their original contexts of creation. Through these collaborations, HRDI aims to support the development of partners' archival capacity, particularly in the areas of digitization, preservation, arrangement, description, and access.
HRDI is a collaboration between LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, the University of Texas Libraries, the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice and various partner organizations and repositories. HRDI and some of its collections have been made possible in part through a grant from the Bridgeway Foundation, as well as other donors.
To contact the HRDI staff, send us an email at hrdi [at] utlists.utexas.edu.