Daejeon, July 27–31
The Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) holds the country's most valuable private rare books library and historical archive, only comparable to the national repositories. Only a fraction of these extensive collections has been digitized and are held in the PUCP Institutional Repository and the Open Data Portal. The minimal digital accessibility to this rich documentary heritage, the absence of institutional digitization and cataloguing standards, and the lack of textual recognition protocols in the digitization of archival and historical sources in Peru, printed or handwritten, pose a serious limitation for students, professors, and researchers, at the PUCP and beyond, and challenges the development of Digital Humanities in Peruvian Studies.
A situation shared by much of the GLAM sector in Peru, this digital gap, both in private and public collections, is part of a broader pattern of neglect and limited access to the country's documentary patrimony. For example, the General National Archive in Peru has been at risk of eviction from its historic premises over the last two years. It also explains why Peruvian archives have received almost twice as many grants as any other country in the region for rescuing documentary collections through the British Library Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), which with the support of Arcadia promotes the digitization of endangered documentary heritage. Most importantly, Peru lacks a national search engine that integrates the catalogs and digital objects of state-held heritage collections, nor does it have a national cataloguing and digitization policy aimed at ensuring interoperability of this data. For example, the AtoM (Access to Memory) system implemented in 2024 at the Peruvian National Archives (https://fondosdocumentales.agn.gob.pe/) houses a limited portion of historical records digitized with different protocols in the production of images and the generation of metadata. Some documents are published in a low resolution which compromises legilibility. In this regard, we propose that, through Digital Humanities methodologies, university archives can help address this issue by ensuring digital accessibility to their collections and guaranteeing the right to the cultural heritage they preserve.
In line with this mission, the Historical Archive of the Riva-Agüero Institute (AHRA) at PUCP is firmly committed to ensuring full digital accessibility, so that our valuable documentary heritage is available to the academic community both in Peru and abroad. We are actively engaged in Digital Humanities initiatives based on three fundamental pillars: (1) training, (2) project design, and (3) international partnerships, the results of which I will briefly summarize below.
The Summer Courses in Digital Humanities PREFALC CONTAMAZ - Contar la Amazonía (Telling the Amazon) organized last year jointly with Marie and Louis Pasteur University (France) and the National University of Colombia evidences our commitment to training. Thanks to the sponsorship of the France Latin America-Caribbean Regional Program, students and scholars from PUCP and UNAL experienced how to use digital humanities tools to analyze an unpublished source, a set of 24 notebooks by Marcos Cavero, an administrator at the Iquitos River Customs Office, handwritten in the early 20th century. The notebooks, which belong to the AHRA Félix Denegri Luna collection, have been digitized thanks to the EAP1495 Peruvian Legacy project, funded by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. A second edition was dedicated to the digital processing of José Eustasio Rivera’s La Vorágine. Both sets of manuscripts were used to teach digital processing, including data extraction with Transkribus, data analysis with Voyant Tools, Iramuteq, and uMap, and other developments in TEI/XML text editing.
The AI-2 Archiving project at the AHRA is developing an Artificial Intelligence toolkit for the standardization and cleaning of its databases, accelerating the process of implementing an open-source cataloguing software (AtoM) for the registration of documentary collections in the AHRA. The diversity of media and types of documents housed in the 86 collections of our archive, whose oldest documents date back to the 16th century, makes it an exceptional pilot for the development of a cataloguing system that can be used in other university documentary and heritage collections, with the expectation that it can be implemented in all types of Peruvian heritage collections.
Ai2 Archiving is in the design phase of an AI-based software prototype to create a customized cataloging system tailored to the specific needs of repositories in Peru’s GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). This prototype consists of a toolkit that includes manuals, prompts, and training materials in Spanish, focused on the cataloging of documentary heritage. Ai2 Archiving improves access to historical archives by speeding up archival cataloging processes, which are key to the preservation and accessibility of historical and documentary collections but are typically laborious and time-consuming. This challenge is even greater in the case of historical manuscripts, which require additional processing time for manual paleographic transcription or the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies.
To address the challenges of standardization—which guarantees data interoperability—in the cataloging of documentary collections and other cultural heritage repositories, it is essential to carry out manual data cleaning and categorization processes that require a considerable number of hours and intensive effort. Although artificial intelligence has begun to be used in cataloging, accelerating the processing of repetitive tasks and the organization of large volumes of information, its application to specific cataloging workflows in Peruvian archives is still in its infancy. In the absence of thesaurus or ontologies specifically designed for cataloging Peruvian cultural heritage, this gap underscores the urgent need to develop and adapt AI technologies that not only understand but also efficiently support data extraction and systematization, thereby enhancing the digital accessibility and preservation of Peru’s archival heritage.
As the Latin American hub for the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, AHRA has also gained significant regional recognition for promoting digital humanities. Our commitment to advancing accessibility to documentary heritage within university archives addresses the challenges of accessing digital sources and the interoperability needs of digital repositories for the study of Peru’s cultural legacy.