Internet Archive teams up with Caribbean island Aruba to release digital archive of over 100,000 historical documents
Aruba Collection: Free Texts: Free Download, Borrow and Streaming: Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/aruba
Aruba Launches Digital Heritage Portal, Preserving Its History and Culture for Global Access | Internet Archive Blogs
https://blog.archive.org/2024/04/08/aruba-launches-digital-heritage-portal-preserving-its-history-and-culture-for-global-access/
Aruba, located off the coast of Venezuela in South America, is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands that is granted a high degree of autonomy, and was originally inhabited by Arawak Indians who migrated from Venezuela. Europeans arrived in 1499, and it became a Dutch colony in the 17th century. In the first half of the 20th century, it flourished with the construction of crude oil transshipment facilities and oil refineries, and in 1986 it gained independence as an autonomous territory.
According to the foreign media WIRED , in 2018, an Internet Archive employee thought, 'Can we contribute to the historical preservation of Aruba, where we spend our annual holidays?' and contacted Peter Scholling, a researcher at the National Library of Aruba, and the project to preserve Aruba's historical materials was launched.
Since then, the National Library of Aruba and the National Archives of Aruba have worked together to collect and digitally scan newspapers, government reports, cultural artifacts, and other artifacts. As Shoring said, 'Aruba has a difficult past due to immigration, colonization, and slavery, which means that its people are scattered all over the world. The same can be said for our collections and documents,' and materials related to Aruba were scattered in the Caribbean, South America, and the United States.
Originally, Aruba, with a population of just 110,000, did not have sufficient resources to make its materials available in a robust digital library. However, by connecting with the Internet Archive, which has a long history of operation and extensive resources, this problem was solved. Raymond Hernandez, director of the National Archives of Aruba, commented, 'Due to the reality of being a small island nation, we don't have much funding for large corporate servers. It's impossible when you have a limited budget. Thanks to the Internet Archive, this dream has come true. We are very grateful.'
The digital archive, called 'Coleccion Aruba,' is hosted by the Internet Archive and contains approximately 40,000 documents, 60,000 images, 900 videos, 45 audio files, seven 3D objects, and 67 thematic collections.
When you actually access 'Coleccion Aruba', various materials are displayed by collection as follows. Click on the collection related to 'Slavery' to try it out.
You can then view various materials related to slavery.
You can also narrow down the materials displayed by selecting the age or media type of the materials using the tabs on the left.
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in Review, Web Service, Posted by log1h_ik