Digitization and Data Curation in a Guatemalan Human Rights Archive

This talk describes a post-custodial digital archive project being built collaboratively by the library at Haverford College and Guatemala’s oldest human rights group, the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM). The GAM has spent the past three decades collecting textual, visual, and audio-materials related to a period of Cold War violence in which Guatemala’s military and police routinely murdered suspected ‘subversives’ while also waging a genocidal campaign against indigenous communities. The project team is building capacity at the GAM to digitize and describe materials specifically related to people ‘disappeared’ by state security forces. The team is also curating data from the archive for a series of digital scholarship projects developed by students, researchers, and legal experts.

Practical advice will be shared on how the team has developed the digitization and descriptive workflows in addition to discussing student involvement and curricular integration. Ethical considerations have been paramount in creating a public-facing project on sensitive materials.

Dr. Alex Galarza is the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Haverford College. He leads the GAM Digital Archive Project and is also Editor of the GradHacker blog and co-founder of footballscholars.org