Many know Aruba as a popular tourist destination with beautiful beaches. The small island nation just north of Venezuela is also home to 110,000 inhabitants with a rich history that many are working to preserve.
Aruba’s memory institutions have been digitizing materials for years. Initially, residents and international scholars could only view the items at the island library. But now with the help of Internet Archive, the Aruba Collection (https://archive.org/details/aruba) is available to anyone for free from anywhere.
“Aruba has a challenging past due to migration, colonization, and slavery,” said Peter Scholing, information specialist/researcher at BNA, the national library. “That means there has been a diaspora of people coming in and spreading out throughout the world—the same goes for our collection and documents.”
Locating materials to digitize involved several local institutions. Because the materials are scattered, Aruba has branched out to collaborate with others in the Caribbean, Venezuela, Netherlands and the United States. The local leaders established protocols and standards for the collection, but didn’t have enough resources to make the materials available in a robust digital library. Connecting with the Internet Archive to host the digital collection provided the missing piece of the puzzle, according to leaders in Aruba.
The collection has more than 100,000 items to date — nearly a one-to-one ratio for the island’s population. This includes about 40,000 documents, 60,000 images, 900 videos, 45 audio files and seven 3D objects for a total of 67 thematic and/or institutional (sub)collections.
Condensed from an entry by Caralee Adams in Internet Archive Blogs.
