Digitising decaying paper slavery records
PAPER documents are still priceless records of the past, even in the digital world. Primary sources stored in local archives throughout Latin America, for example, describe a centuries-old multi-ethnic society grappling with questions of race, class and religion.
But 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 mouldy rubbish.
Working closely with colleagues from around the world, I build digital archives and specialised 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 in future.
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.
Since 2003, the Slave Societies Digital Archive has collected more than 700 000 digitised images of historical records documenting the lives of millions of Africans and people of African descent in North and South America.
Members of the core team, from universities in the US, Canada, and Brazil, travel to project sites throughout Latin America, where they train local students and archivists to digitise ecclesiastical and government records from their communities.
We give these communities the cameras, computers and other hardware they need to digitally preserve documents piled in the corners of 18th-century church basements or are about to be discarded by spacecrunched municipal archives.
We also teach them a crucial skill for archiving and retrieval: how to create metadata, the descriptive information to help people find what interests them – like whether a document is a marriage certificate or baptism record, and what year and town it’s from.
Good metadata allows visitors to the project website to, for example, search for all baptism records from 17th-century Colombia.
Over time, we’ve got much better at digitising documents. In older images, it’s not uncommon to see the photographer’s finger straying in from the side of the frame. Some of those older images are stored as relatively low-resolution JPEG files, a format that compresses the image file size by deleting some data when it’s saved.
Most files are still completely legible even when a viewer zooms in, but some are not and will need to be digitised again in the future.
Our more recent preservation adheres to the rigorous standards of the British Library, which funds much of our work. Those images are taken in very high resolutions and stored in multiple file-formats including TIFF, which remains the archival standard.
Transforming a collection of digitised images into a true digital archive is a time-consuming and detailed effort.