Aruba is backing up its historical records in the Internet Archive, a first for a digital preservation site. The Archives announced on April 8 that it will open the Coleccion Aruba portal, providing worldwide access to more than 100,000 Aruban historical documents. These works include material collected in the National Library and Archives of Aruba since 1986, when it became a state under the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
According to the Internet Archive, the Aruba collection “includes approximately 40,000 documents, 60,000 images, 900 videos, 45 audio files and 7 3D objects, for a total of 67 thematic and/or institutional (sub)collections”. Archive says that in addition to adding everything to its own servers, it also uses the decentralized Filecoin network to back everything up.
Coleccion Aruba uses the normal Archive interface, so you can search it, filter by file type, and sort by year. One of the older documents I found is the 1794 map of Aruba above.
according to wiredThe project “kicked off” in 2018 when digital archivist Stacy Argondizzo began thinking about helping the country preserve its physical archives, which she feared might be destroyed by extreme weather. Her family regularly vacations in Aruba. “Basically, they were one disaster away from losing everything,” she told the website.
The project is reportedly complex as it involves scanning “piles of dusty books and fragile decades-old newspapers” and collecting them scattered across countries such as the Netherlands, Spain and the United States (due to the country’s colonial past ) files around the world. State budgets are “meager.”
as wired It was pointed out that the archives had carried out similar work before, such as backing up 90% of the documents in Bali Province, Indonesia. You can find these on the Bali Digital Library website.
Hosting Aruba’s historical materials adds new meaning to the Internet Archive’s unwieldy mission of digital preservation. The nonprofit was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, and as of this writing, it holds 99 petabytes, or 99,000 terabytes, of unique data.
More than half of them are the Wayback Machine, which is a collection of archived websites that even include things like me and my crappy AOL homepage edgeby Alex Kranz (I’m not linking these because they are our version of Mutually Assured Destruction).
The archive also houses various VHS tapes, ancient computer games, Lego set instructions, analog calculators, sponsored movies and Google Plus posts. I could easily have spent several days or more browsing its massive store. Today, the site is threatened with legal action over its preservation efforts, such as a ruling last year that it couldn’t serve as an e-book library, and a music industry lawsuit against the site’s Great 78 Project, which archives old recordings.
But at a time when the internet itself is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate without getting bogged down in SEO junk and misinformation, the Internet Archive is one of our most important assets as we view human history through images, text, music, and video. Here are some interesting items I found at Coleccion Aruba, starting with a picture of a band playing Calypso music at a 1944 cricket match:
Photo credit: Nelson Morris / Lago Oil & Transport Co. Ltd.
“Aruba Dushi Tera”, the Aruba national anthem, recorded in 1978.
1980 Showtime recording:
This delightful banana bus takes elderly Arubaans to a Seniors Breakfast and here is a brief news report about the event:
and, because this is edgea picture of a BlackBerry phone: