ECLAC Library completes digitization of its historical archive
Posted: Monday, 21 November 2011, Santiago | Author: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Carabbean
After various years of intense work, the Hernán Santa Cruz Library of the Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) recently finished digitizing more than 16,000 historical documents that were formerly only available in paper.
The project digitized documents published between 1948 - ECLAC's founding year - to 2000, the year the Commission started to produce most of its publications in a digital format. In total, 1 million 100 thousand (1,100,000) pages were scanned, one by one, a work of great precision that required a large commitment on the part of the Library staff who collaborated with the staff of the external company that did the work on site.
The digitization has meant a great advancement since all ECLAC documents held by the Library, in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, are now available through its electronic catalog and can be viewed in full by anyone via the Internet.
This achievement places the Hernán Santa Cruz Library at the vanguard, since ECLAC is now delivering full-text access, world-wide, to its complete intellectual archive through its online catalog.
In the digitization process, print documents were transformed into PDF, PDF-A (archive), and TIFF formats, and enabled with OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which allows the texts to be recognized by a text processor (for example, MS Word). Texts can also be transferred to Excel and are searchable.
To Ellen Schaffer, Library Chief from August 2006 to August 2011 and one of the main promoters of the project, it was a very important professional achievement. "We don't have an official ECLAC archive, so this project allowed us to preserve historical documents and make them available to the entire world," she said.
"This work has been of a high quality. I am proud to have been a part of it," said Amelia Craig, the current Officer-in-Charge of the ECLAC Library. "We are at the vanguard. We now know that we can accomplish what we want, with high quality and with enthusiasm," she stressed.
For one person of the Library staff the work had special importance because he entered ECLAC precisely to work on this project.
"I entered ECLAC in 2004 to work on document digitization. It is exciting to know that this archive will continue to be available for generations to come. We only had one paper copy of some of these books, and they were in very bad condition. Because of this effort, they can be accessed forever," Fabián Barros, Library Clerk, recounted.
He explains that thanks to this work, now other important ECLAC collections are available to the public, such as the publications of Raúl Prebisch, former Executive Secretary between 1950-1963.