Last week Aruba launched the island nation’s digital heritage portal online: Coleccion Aruba. As trumpeted in Wired:  “The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island,” but really the credit goes to Aruba. Digitizing their national cultural heritage (100k items) and putting it online for free public access is a huge achievement.

I met with the Prime Minister (pictured above), the Minister of Culture, and the Minister of Education who backed the efforts made by the National Librarian, National Archivist, and their digital strategist. Never have I seen such unified support for cultural preservation and access. They brought together people from the Dutch islands and the Internet Archive to share the news and to inspire and to lead.

Aruba was the first to sign onto the Four Digital Rights of Memory Institutions: right to Collect, Preserve, provide Access, and interlibrary Collaboration. These are bad times when we have to reclaim these rights that are being taken from all libraries, but Aruba is making a stand. Go Aruba!

If libraries are reduced to only subscribing to commercial database products rather than owning and curating collections, we will be beholden to external corporations and subject to their whims over what’s in licensed collections, and how patrons can access them. The “Spotify for Books” model is not the way we want our libraries to go. 

To top it off, the Prime Minister, Evelyn Wever-Croes, inspired us when she told us that for the next generation, we need to “Give them the opportunity to search for the truth.” Yes.

Inspiring to see a country lead so well. I hope we have the honor of working with other nations that will also assert Digital Rights for Libraries, and live by those principles.

– Brewster Kahle