The Internet Archive is now hosting Aruba’s history

A picture of an Aruban Divi Divi tree. — *A Divi Divi tree, which always points southwest because of the island’s trade winds.* | Image: Hans W. Hannau / Carol Burns and Jane Suter Collection

Aruba is backing up its history on the Internet Archive, a first for the digital preservation site. The Archive announced on April 8th that it was opening the portal to Coleccion Aruba, giving worldwide access to more than 100,000 of Aruba’s historical documents. The works include materials that Aruba began collecting under its national library and archives after it became a country under the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1986.

According to the Internet Archive, the Aruba collection “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.” Besides adding everything to its own servers, the Archive says it’s also backing everything up using the decentralized Filecoin network.

A scan of a hand-drawn map of Aruba from 1794. — *A map of Aruba, dated 1794.*

Coleccion Aruba uses the normal Archive interface, so you can search through it, filter by file type, and sort by year. One of the older documents I found is the above map of Aruba from 1794.

According to Wired, the project was “set in motion” in 2018 when Stacy Argondizzo, a digital archivist whose family regularly vacations in Aruba, began considering helping the country preserve its physical archives, which she worried could be destroyed by extreme weather. “They were one disaster away, basically, from losing everything,” she told the site.

The project was reportedly complicated, as it involved scanning “stacks of dusty tomes and fragile decades-old newspapers” and collecting documents that were scattered around the world (owing to the nation’s colonial history) in countries like The Netherlands, Spain, and the United States, all on a “shoestring” budget.

As Wired notes, the Archive has carried out similar work before, such as backing up 90 percent of the Indonesian island province of Bali’s literature. You can find that collected on the site as the Balinese Digital Library.

Hosting Aruba’s historical materials adds a new flavor of significance to the Internet Archive’s unwieldy mission of digital preservation. The nonprofit organization was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, and as of this writing, it hosts 99 petabytes of unique data, or 99,000 terabytes.

More than half of that is the Wayback Machine, its collection of archived websites that even includes things like the bad AOL homepages from both myself and The Verge’s Alex Cranz (I’m not linking these, as they’re our version of mutually assured destruction).

The Archive also hosts assortments of VHS tapes, ancient computer games, Lego set instructions, emulated calculators, sponsored films, and Google Plus posts. I’ve easily lost altogether days or more to poring through its vast stores. The site is threatened today by legal battles over its preservation efforts, such as last year’s ruling that it can’t serve as a library for ebooks and a music industry lawsuit pointed at the site’s Great 78 Project to archive old records.

But the Internet Archive is one of our greatest assets when it comes to viewing human history through images, texts, music, and videos at a time when the internet itself is increasingly difficult to navigate without barreling into SEO junk and misinformation. Here are some of the interesting items I found in Coleccion Aruba, starting with an image of a band playing Calypso music at a cricket match in 1944: