Neogranadina

We are a Colombian non-profit devoted to using new technologies to protect and promote the historical heritage of Latin America.

We design and build custom scanners to digitize historical collections, create tools and platforms to make them accessible, and develop digital history projects.

Fundación Histórica Neogranadina is a non-profit foundation constituted in the Republic of Colombia. N.I.T. 900.861.407. © 2026 Neogranadina
Documentos permanencia ESAL

Zasqua

Our open-source platform for archival discovery and publication

Summary

Zasqua is Neogranadina’s platform for the publication and discovery of digitized historical documents. It is the successor to the ABC, our earlier platform built on CollectiveAccess, and gives Neogranadina’s collections a stable, open-access home that does not depend on any single hosted service or proprietary software.

The platform currently holds over 104,000 archival descriptions across five repositories in Colombia and Peru, with deep-zoom viewing of over 121,000 images and full-text search across all collections, including OCR content from printed sources.

Zasqua is entirely open source. The source code is available on GitHub: backend, frontend.

What makes it distinctive

The entire public site is pre-built as static files — there is no application server, no database, and no search engine running at request time. Search is handled client-side, hierarchical navigation uses pre-built JSON trees, and all images are served as IIIF static tiles. The result is a site that is fast, cheap to host, and resilient. It can be archived, mirrored, or rebuilt from exports at any time.

Features

  • Full-text search across all collections, with filters by repository, description level, date, country, language, and digital status
  • Deep-zoom image viewing on all digitized items, with thumbnail navigation and fullscreen mode
  • Hierarchical browsing from repository down to individual items
  • Bilingual metadata (English and Spanish) following ISAD(G) archival description standards

The name

Zasqua is a Muisca-language word meaning “to place oneself,” “to settle,” “to remain in a given place or condition.” The platform carries this name because that is what it does: it places digitized documentary collections in a stable, open-access space. Documents that were scattered, hard to consult, or at risk of being lost find a place of their own here.

Partners

Zasqua was developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara, within the Archives, Memory, and Preservation Lab (AMPL).