Summary

The Collective Catalog of Colombian Archives was a platform that we developed in 2015 with support from the UC Humanities Research Institute and UC Santa Barbara. It sought to serve as a cross-institutional repository for the archival descriptions and other metadata of the collections of archives, libraries, and other institutions holding historical materials across Colombia. One aim of this project was to provide the institutions with whom we work a reliable solution to manage their metadata and to publish it, something that has generally been beyond the means of smaller institutions. For this we also worked with these institutions to update and expand their metadata according to modern cataloguing and archival description standards. Another was to offer researchers and the general public a means to locate materials across different institutional repositories. When metadata referred to materials we had digitized and published, the CCAC pointed users to the appropriate record in our digital archive platform, the Collective Archive.

We retired the Collective Catalog of Colombian Archives as an independent platform in 2023, and transfered all of its contents, along with those of the Collective Archives to the ABC (Archive, Library, Catalog in its Spanish initials), our new, consolidated platform for the publication of images of digitised archival and library materials and their associated metadata. We have since expanded our collection of archival metadata considerably, with the addition of new collections from Colombia and Peru.

Accomplishments

• The CCAC was a pathbreaking project in Colombia, where no such resource existed.
• At launch, the CCAC had contained 25,000 individual descriptions of individual archival documents and over 30,000 authority records (of individuals, institutions, events, places, and subjects).
• The CCAC ran on Access to Memory (AtoM), and we provided training and prepared documentation for our partners and volunteers on how to use it.
• In 2023, we archived this platform and transferred all its contents into ABC, which launched with more than 100,000 descriptions and almost 50,000 authority records.

Financing

Financing