Aruba’s Prime Minister, Evelyn Wever-Croes: “Give them the opportunity to search for the truth.”
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!
Aruba’s National Librarian, Astrid Britten, signs the Four Rights, as the National Archivist, Raymond Hernandez, and Brewster Kahle look on.
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.
From left: Aruba’s National Librarian, Astrid Britten (Director, Biblioteca Nacional Aruba), signs the statement protecting memory organizations online as Raymond Hernandez (Director, Archivo Nacional Aruba) and Brewster Kahle (Founder, Internet Archive) look on.
This was a week of firsts in Aruba. The small island nation in the southern Caribbean launched its new heritage portal, the Aruba Collection (Coleccion Aruba), and it became the first country to sign a statement to protect the digital rights of libraries & other memory institutions.
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Chris Freeland, director of library services at the Archive, attended the signing ceremony in Aruba, a country in the Kingdom of the Netherlands located 18 miles north of Venezuela.
Support for the statement, Four Digital Rights For Protecting Memory Institutions Online, was spearheaded by Peter Scholing, information scientist and researcher at the country’s national library, Biblioteca Nacional Aruba (BNA). Last fall, he learned about the need for library digital rights to be championed during a conference at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. While much of that discussion was based on the 2022 report, “Securing Digital Rights for Libraries: Towards an Affirmative Policy Agenda for a Better Internet,” authored by Lila Bailey and Michael Menna, and focused on protecting library access to e-books, Scholing was interested in Aruba making a broader statement—one encompassing all memory institutions and the diverse types of materials they house.
“Over the last few months we’ve brainstormed about these digital rights and how to broaden the statement to make it relevant to not only libraries, but also for memory institutions and GLAMs in general,” said Scholing, using the acronym for galleries, libraries, archives & museums. “In that sense, it has become a near universal declaration for open access to information, in line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2030 Agenda/Sustainable Development Goals, #16.10) or other statements on open access to documentary, cultural or digital heritage. This aligns almost perfectly with what we aim to achieve here on Aruba—universal access to “our” information.”
Many memory institutions on the island have long worked together to digitize collections including books, government documents, photos and videos. The statement reinforces the importance of libraries, archives, museums and other memory institutions being able to fulfill their mission by preserving knowledge for the public to access.
Initial Signing Organizations
Archivo Nacional Aruba (ANA)
Aruban National Committee for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme
Biblioteca Nacional Aruba (BNA)
Coleccion Aruba
Museo Arkeologico Nacional Aruba (MANA)
Stichting Monumentenfonds Aruba
Union di Organisacionnan Cultural Arubano (UNOCA)
The statement asserts that the rights and responsibilities that memory institutions have always enjoyed offline must also be protected online. To accomplish this goal, libraries, archives and museums must have the legal rights and practical ability to:
Collect digital materials, including those made available only via streaming and other restricted means, through purchase on the open market or any other legal means, no matter the underlying file format;
Preserve those materials, and where necessary repair or reformat them, to ensure their long-term existence and availability;
Provide controlled access to digital materials for advanced research techniques and to patrons where they are—online;
Cooperate with other memory institutions, by sharing or transferring digital collections, so as to provide more equitable access for communities in remote and less well-funded areas.
In Aruba, Scholing said library and archive leaders believed strongly that these rights should be upheld with a public endorsement. Michael Menna, co-author of the statement and the 2022 report, saw this as a key first step in building a coalition of memory institutions.
“Aruba has been brave to make such a clear and unequivocal statement about the many challenges facing libraries, archives, and museums,” said Menna. “Simply put, these essential institutions need better protections to adapt their services to today’s media environment. Hopefully, after hearing Aruba speak out, others can follow suit.”
Report co-author Lila Bailey, senior policy counsel at the Internet Archive, said that seeing the statement embraced and endorsed by memory institutions is rewarding.
“It is a thrill to see Aruba leading the way towards a better digital future for memory institutions worldwide,” said Bailey. “These institutions must meet the needs of a modern public using the best tools available. It is good public policy and basic common sense that libraries, archives and museums should be not only permitted but encouraged to leverage digital technologies to serve their essential public functions.”
The statement can be endorsed by governments, organizations, and individuals following a verification process. If you are interested in signing the statement, or would like to learn more, please complete the initial online inquiry, or e-mail Chris Freeland, Internet Archive’s director of library services, at chrisfreeland@archive.org.
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 library on the island. But now with the help of Internet Archive, the Aruba Collection (Coleccion Aruba) is available to anyone for free from anywhere.
A celebration of the heritage portal’s launch is being held via livestream on April 8.
COLLABORATION IS KEY
Digitizing the island’s historic materials was a collaborative effort. After Aruba became a country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1986, the national library (Biblioteca Nacional Aruba; Aruba National Library – BNA) and the national archives (Archivo Nacional Aruba; National Archives of Aruba – ANA) were established. Leaders from the two institutions worked together to curate and scan artifacts including newspapers, government reports, and cultural items.
“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 on the island. 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.
Kaart van het Eiland Aruba (1825) / Map of the Island of Aruba (1825)
Connecting with the Internet Archive to host the digital collection provided the missing piece of the puzzle, according to leaders in Aruba. “Because of the reality of our small island state, we don’t have much funding for big company servers,” said Raymond Hernandez, head of the Aruba National Archives (ANA). “If you have a limited budget, it’s not possible. The dream has come true, thanks to the Internet Archive. We are very grateful.”
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.
As an additional layer of protection, the materials are being uploaded to the Filecoin decentralized storage network, thanks to a longstanding relationship between the Internet Archive and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW).
Chelsea Schields, University of California, Irvine
For Chelsea Schields, associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, the materials were so compelling and easy to use that she integrated them into her undergraduate course, “Oil and Capitalism.” Students learn about the global history of petroleum and develop research skills to build an argument based on evidence. “Students use the Aruba Collection to write research papers related to the culture of oil towns,” Schields said. “It is often their favorite part of the course because they get to dig into the sources themselves and identify the themes that resonate across those materials.”
Unlike other primary source collections, which are often cumbersome and hidden behind a costly paywall, the diverse sources found enabled students to write papers on topics ranging from migrant domestic workers in Aruba to the spatial organization of oil towns.
In her own research for a book on the social histories of oil refineries on Aruba and Curaçao, Schields said the Aruba heritage portal was extremely useful when the COVID-19 pandemic restricted travel in the summer of 2020. “The Aruba Collection provided such an indispensable, bottom-up portrait of the history of the island’s Lago Refinery, which at its peak was among the largest plants in the world,” she said. “From photographs of refinery workers and their families to digitized copies of employee publications, these sources allowed me to see the labor required to transform oil into the commodities we rely upon today.”
Adi Martis, Utrecht University (emeritus)
Since the launch of Coleccion Aruba, Adi Martis said he uses the website almost every day. The emeritus associate professor at Utrecht University in The Netherlands appreciates how easy it is to access a variety of materials in national archives and the national library collections. For example, by combining data from digitized historical maps and land ownership register books from the Aruban Land Registry, users can gain an insight into the history of land ownership on the island, he said.
By applying AI-based, Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) algorithms, the digitized, difficult-to-read handwritten texts are made accessible to the public and transformed into searchable data. Martis said in some cases, digitized archives from Aruba, Curaçao and the Netherlands are combined and search results are sometimes surprising—in particular with data about the history of slavery. Users can search using different keywords and the site can even create family trees, which normally can be difficult because the slaves had no surnames.
“For the past 50 years I have been doing archival research and I must admit that I am proud of my small island that was able to achieve such incredible results in such a short time with the help of Internet Archive,” Martis said.
Jan Bant, a doctoral student in history from Aruba who lives in The Netherlands, relied heavily on the Coleccion Aruba when doing research for his master’s thesis in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Although he was unable to return to the island, he accessed journals and newspaper articles from Europe to examine Aruba’s political climate between in the 1970s and 80s. Being able to enter key words and dates in the search function was particularly helpful in locating sources. Bant was able to uncover documents about protests, revealing the country’s somewhat radical traditions of commenting on world affairs despite its image as a calm player in the Caribbean, he said.
As Bant continues his PhD research on the role of sports in Dutch Caribbean communities, he is tapping into the Coleccion Aruba, including materials about the oil refinery and laborers who brought baseball to the island.
Bant contributed back to the portal by uploading his completed master’s thesis, which was completed in 2021. “There is a lot of research about Aruba that gets written but it’s never really used—often because people don’t know where to find it,” Bant said. “The Aruba Collection can also serve well as a repository to store research that has been done about Aruba. That’s what I think is very valuable.”
SERVING PATRONS
Aruba’s UNOCA Managing Director Ray-Anne Hernandez said the heritage portal allows users to easily search her foundation’s work of arts and culture. Researchers now can go to one place to locate digitized images and documents.
“We have collections that we want to share and have accessible to the public, so this was a logical step to be part of this collaboration,” Hernadez said. “In the collection, we have history. We have art, music, and education. It’s so much more than we initially thought it would be and that fills us with great pride and great joy. It’s not just that we made a website. It’s something that’s continually growing and everybody is using it.”
The Dutch Caribbean Digital Heritage Week will be held on Aruba April 8-12. For the first day, April 8, a day-long symposium is planned, titled “Connecting our Shared Heritage: Linking (Dutch) Caribbean Heritage Institutions and Collections”, with keynote speeches from Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Eppo van Nispen (Dutch Network for Digital Heritage NDE and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), and contributions from a wide range of heritage professionals from across the Dutch Caribbean, and the world. It will be livestreamed via https://coleccion.aw/stream.
The island nation of Aruba, population 110,000, lies 18 miles north of Venezuela, part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
On March 15, the small island nation of Aruba, part of the Dutch Caribbean, closed its borders to visitors. Cruise ships packed with tourists stopped coming. Casinos, libraries and schools shut their doors, as Aruba’s 110,000 residents locked down to halt the spread of COVID-19.
Librarians quickly gathered reading lists from students, parents and schools. With high school graduation exams just a month away, the required literature books would be crucial. Aruban students are tested on books in Dutch, English, Spanish and their native language of Papiamento. “Just before your literary final exams, you need to re-read the books,” explained Peter Scholing, who leads digitization efforts at the National Library of Aruba. “The libraries are closed. Your school libraries are closed. You can order from Amazon, but it takes weeks and weeks to arrive. If you are in an emergency, then you hope your books are online.”
Peter Scholing of the National Library of Aruba also works with UNESCO, preserving cultural heritage
Scholing was relieved to discover that most of the required literature in English and Spanish was available in the Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library. As library staff moved to work from home, they grabbed the tools to digitize the books in Papiamento that were missing. Many local authors were easy to track down and most gladly gave permission for free downloads or loaning their works. Scholing reports, “Some of them choose digital lending. But a lot of them say, ‘Well it was a limited print run….I’ve sold all the copies of my books, now you can just make it available for download.’”
Preservation Pays Off
Classroom in Aruba, 1944, filled with children of expatriates, working in oil refineries.
For many years, the library’s small Special Collections staff had been diligently digitizing key collections: photographs, historic texts, newspapers, and perhaps the world’s largest collection of texts in Papiamento. But with few technical resources, the National Library of Aruba had no way to provide access to those works. Scholing says the Internet Archive proved to be the “missing link.” In March 2019, the Library was able to unveil its new Digital Collection, 18,800 texts, videos and audio now accessible to the world on archive.org. Today, with libraries and schools closed, these materials are the keys to unlocking the doors to online learning.
“We didn’t imagine something like the Covid crisis could happen,” said Scholing. “But for our preservation efforts, this is the Big One. We are really lucky to be able to provide access to information that we couldn’t otherwise without the Internet Archive.”
This Papiamento literary journal is among the 18,800 items now online thanks to the Biblioteca Nacional Aruba
When Waitlists Won’t Work
Novels, biographies and non-fiction titles in Papiamento are part of the Aruban curriculum and now many are accessible online
Although Scholing had permission from the authors to lend their recent books, several times we accidentally reinstituted the waiting list, since the National Emergency Library does not include books from the last five years. That meant students reading the work suddenly would have had to wait, sometimes for weeks, to move up the waiting list. Scholing wrote to us immediately: “There must be an alternative. I’m getting emails from students and teachers already.”
Eventually we worked out the kinks so Aruba’s books in the National Emergency Library wouldn’t get taken down. In addition, hundreds of texts in Papiamento from 1844-2020 are now available without waitlist. It’s part of a bigger vision on the island to teach students to read and write the language they speak at a higher level. “A lot of textbooks come straight from the Netherlands…you are reading about snow, trains and windmills,” Scholing explained. “It’s better to use something from a newspaper or magazine produced locally…It’s their own context. It speaks more to them.”
He even received this note from a local author, written in Papiamento:
Peter aprecia, (Dear Peter,)
Hopi admiracion pa e trabou cu bo ta desplegando pa Aruba y nos hendenan.
(A lot of admiration for the work that you are carrying out for Aruba and for our people.)
This week, schools in Aruba are scheduled to reopen. Since March, the library has tripled the number of items in its digital collection, and visitors have increased by 300%. Scholing sees this as evidence that the National Emergency Library will have lasting benefit. “All the thresholds and barriers to access this unique information have been lifted, once you put it online.”
You can now access newspapers, photos, maps, government publications, literature and rare books from Aruba in their collection at the Internet Archive.
