Aruba’s colonial history also meant that documents were scattered everywhere. “Our collection was scattered,” says Edric Croes, director of archival preservation and management at the National Archives of Aruba. Works could be scanned all over the world, including in the Netherlands, Spain, the United States and other islands such as Curaçao. Creating a hub to find the documents online, Scholing said, has been particularly helpful for researchers abroad who no longer have to travel to Aruba to physically dig through the archives.
It is unusual for a country to outsource such a project to a foreign nonprofit organization. “In a dream world, every national library would have enough money to put together an amazing team of people,” says Ian Milligan, a history professor at the University of Waterloo who is writing a book about the origins of the Internet Archive and was not involved in the Aruba project. “Governments often don’t have that.”
The Internet Archive has not previously acted as a custodian of a country’s entire collection, although it has worked with a number of national and regional libraries around the world. Back in 2011, it partnered with the Cultural Office of Bali, an island province of Indonesia, to preserve what the office described at the time as “90 percent of Bali’s literature.” (This now forms the Internet Archive’s Balinese Digital Library collection.)
Aruba archivists hope other nations follow in its digital footsteps. “It’s a really viable model that could be applied to many small islands, developing countries and even larger countries with limited resources,” says Scholing.
A partnership with the Internet Archive seems like an obvious solution for cash-strapped archivists. However, potential partners need to think about what it means to rely on another country’s private organization, which has its own challenges.
“When we think about digital preservation, we often think about the technical challenges,” says Milligan, of Waterloo. “But I think the biggest challenges are the social challenges, the human challenges. How can you build an organization that will be around 50 years from now?”
He attributes the Internet Archive to having a very “sustainable structure” in terms of future security. But that doesn’t make it completely invulnerable. The archive is currently facing a number of serious legal challenges, including a lawsuit from major record labels including Universal Music Group, Capitol and Sony, which poses an existential threat – the labels are seeking damages that could total over $400 million.
There is also an ongoing dispute with publishers over a digital lending library set up during the pandemic. While its digitization capabilities are far more robust than those of many nation-states, the Internet Archive’s position in an increasingly vile battlefield between copyright holders and tech companies means its future is also precarious.
The Internet Archive considers Aruba’s support to be particularly timely. “It’s really encouraging to see the nation of Aruba continue to add materials and upload content at the same time we’re facing this,” Freeland said. “We’re in it for the long haul.”