The advent of artificial intelligence has

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Made quite an impact in the world of documentary heritage, with one of the newest developments being handwritten text recognition (HTR).With new technologies like the AI-supported Transkribus, HTR technologies are becoming available not only to the bigger institutions in wealthy nations, but also to small island institutions such as Biblioteca Nacional Aruba (the Aruba National Library) and Archivo Nacional Aruba (the Aruba National Archives), which adopted this new technology at a relatively early stage in 2019. The ability to add text layers to scanned manuscripts unlocked documentary treasure chests containing centuries of written records, correspondence, and prose—all within the reach of the Aruba institutions.

After a pilot project in 2022–2023, called “Coleccion Aruba,” between the Internet Archive, the National Library of Aruba, and the National Archives of Aruba, the Aruba subcollection of the Internet Archive became one color correction the first online platforms where full-text search for handwritten documents was made available. This functionality was completely integrated into its full-text search capabilities, with words and phrases in centuries-old documents becoming just as easy to find as words and phrases written down or spoken as part of the current news cycle. Few (commercial) archival platforms offer full-text search for handwritten sources separately, let alone fully integrated or at no cost, like the Internet Archive does.

In April 2024, the Internet Archive, together with their Aruban partners, announced plans to attempt to digitize all works published in the Papiamento language, enlarging the online footprint of the Papiamento language even more, starting with the works held by Biblioteca Nacional Aruba in their National and special collections. These works will be digitized in-house by the institutions themselves, and to assist in this effort, the Internet Archive has pledged to send a book scanner to the island to increase the scanning capacity on the island. After having visited their new Coleccion Aruba partners, the Internet Archive—together with Aruban national broadcaster Telearuba— have also joined forces to digitally preserve all contents of Telearuba’s livestream and TV offerings. Once combined with the aforementioned future automatic captioning support for Papiamento, thousands of hours of Aruba’s audiovisual heritage will also be opened up for full-text search, for further research and for use in Aruba’s education system, which is currently transitioning from a colonial-era education system completely taught in Dutch to a multilingual model mother tongue-based education system.

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, the use of online resources and demand for digital access to information increased greatly: online access was not just expected, but became a basic necessity and a direct life-line for many people. Luckily, with Aruba being a small-scale society like, the library was able to meet this increased demand by rapidly operationalizing the “short lines” that exist between them and local book authors and publishers, by making available crucial resources, such as Papiamento language literary works and essential resources like daily newspapers —free of cost, to not only Aruban students, but also to the general public.