The Centro de Estudios Históricos “José María Arboleda Llorente” at the Universidad del Cauca – also known by its previous name, the Archivo Central del Cauca – is located in the city of Popayán, and contains one of the richest collections of colonial-era documents in Colombia. Popayán was a very important administrative centre during the consolidation of the Spanish empire in the northern part of South America between the 16th and 19th centuries. The collection contains records of the purchase and sale of enslaved persons, the minutes of local government bodies, among others. Between 2015 and 2019, Neogranadina began digitizing this material for online publication.

Accomplishments

• Neogranadina designed and built a document scanner to digitize these manuscripts and provided training to an operator in its use.
• We digitized thousands of historical documents, of which 1,800 are available on the ABC platform.
• We also sistematized and published all of the archival descriptions, finding aids, and catalogs of the ACC. These 26,343 archival records can be found on the ABC platform.

Partners

The alliance between Neogranadina and the Centro has relied on the help of the team at the Centro and especially:

• Hedwig Hartmann
• Raul Arroyave

Funding