Summary

The Archivo Histórico Regional de Boyacá in Tunja, Boyacá, Colombia, houses one of the most complete collection of colonial-era administrative and notarial documents in Latin America. The collection includes wills, deeds, sale and purchase records, contracts, royal decrees, papal bulls, civil and criminal lawsuits, acts of the municipal council, and other legal documents. Between 2015 and 2018, Neogranadina digitized much of this material and has been working to prepare it for online publication since.

Accomplishments

• Neogranadina designed and built a custom document scanner to digitize the colonial material housed at this archive and provided training to an operator in its use.
• We have digitized more than 580 volumes of historical documents, totalling about 420,000 images.
• We developed a peer-production program, Collaborative Cataloguing to describe the material, much of which lacked archival descriptions.
• We processed the digital images for online pubilcation.
• We continue to create and systematize the catalogs and metadata, and to publish the results in our online archive platform, the ABC.

Partners

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

• Rósula Vargas de Castañeda
• Alva Arévalo
• Nancy Rojas

Financing