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The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island
By becoming the official custodian of an entire nation’s history for the first time, the Internet Archive is expanding its already outsize role in preserving the digital world for posterity.
The island has a turbulent past—its indigenous population was colonized by the Spanish and then the Dutch—and its archives contain artefacts ranging from sunny vintage postcards to books about the nation’s role in the slave trade and Venuzuela’s oil boom. But the Internet Archive provided the software to organize the sprawling collection, including algorithms to decipher handwriting to turn centuries-old penmanship into digital text ready for modern readers. “In a dream world, every national library would have enough funds to bring on an amazing team of people,” says University of Waterloo history professor Ian Milligan, who is writing a book on the Internet Archive’s origins, and was not involved in the Aruba project.
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