One of the goals of the MLA has been to facilitate cross-institutional partnerships to enhance resource sharing and support projects.
Lehigh Valley Historical Maps Consortium
The Lehigh Valley Historical Maps Consortium (LVHMC) is a group of local archivists, librarians, curators, and historians with an interest in historical maps who collaborate with the goal of establishing a collective inventory of maps related to the Lehigh Valley. Ultimately this inventory will provide a centralized resource for the discovery of maps which have been digitized for access over the internet, as well as for those physical maps which remain in map drawers in libraries, museums and historical societies across the Valley.
Cultural Quarantine
In response to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the MLA, supported by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium (LVEHC), saw a crucial need to document how this global catastrophe would impact its peer institutions–many of whom were already struggling for financial and human resources long before 2020. In an effort to archive the shared humanity of the moment, MLA invited local organizations to document the effects of COVID-19 on their organizations. Ultimately, MLA invited four of those institutions to chronicle their experiences in-depth, both professionally and personally, over the course of fifteen months.
