Paper documents are still priceless records of the past, even in a digital world. Primary sources stored in local archives throughout Latin America, for example, describe a centuries-old multiethnic society grappling with questions of race, class and religion.
However, paper archives are vulnerable to flooding, humidity, insects, and rodents, among other threats. Political instability can cut off money used to maintain archives and institutional neglect can transform precious records into moldy rubbish.
Working closely with colleagues from around the world, I build digital archives and specialized tools that help us learn from those records, which trace the lives of free and enslaved people of African descent in the Americas from the 1500s to the 1800s. Our effort, the Slave Societies Digital Archive, is one of many humanities projects that have accumulated substantial collections of digital images of paper documents.
The goal is to ensure this information—including some from documents that no longer exist physically—is accessible to future generations.
But preserving history by taking high-resolution photographs of centuries-old documents is only the beginning. Technological advances help scholars and archivists like me do a better job of preserving these records and learning from them, but don’t always make it easy.
An archive in Cuba contains paper treasures that are hard to use and study – even in person. Slave Societies Digital Archive, CC BY-ND
Collecting Documents
Since 2003, the Slave Societies Digital Archive has collected more than 700,000 digitized images of historical records ..
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