The just released Gabriel García Márquez’s digital collection includes about half (approx. 27,500 item) from the complete GGM papers collection. that the Ransom Center acquired in 2014. The project received funding from a CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant, uses OCLC’s CONTENTdm platform. Images can be viewed/compared using IIIF’s Mirador viewer.
From The NY Times:
The online archive, which is cataloged both in English and in Spanish, includes drafts and other material relating to all of García Márquez’s major books, including “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which turned the Colombia-born writer into a global figure. There are also previously unseen photographs, notebooks, scrapbooks, screenplays and personal ephemera, like a collection of his passports.
Many archives are digitizing their holdings. But to make so much material from a writer whose work is still under copyright freely available online is unusual.
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Seeing some items in the archive, which the Ransom Center bought for $2.2 million, will still require a trip to Texas. The digital collection does not include any of the 10 drafts of García Márquez’s final, unfinished novel, “We’ll See Each Other in August.” (One chapter of the novel was published in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia in 2014, shortly after García Márquez’s death at age 87; the estate said via email that it has no further plans for publication.)
From the Digital Collection’s Website:
The digital archive of Colombian-born writer Gabriel García Márquez includes manuscript drafts of published and unpublished works, research material, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, clippings, notebooks, screenplays, printed material, ephemera, and an audio recording of García Márquez’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. The searchable, online archive is comprised of approximately 27,500 items from García Márquez’s papers…
From HRC:
The project, which includes text-searchable English- and Spanish-language materials, took 18 months and involved the efforts of librarians, archivists, students, technology staff members and conservators. The university’s Benson Latin American Collection provided guidance on how best to describe García Márquez materials in Spanish.
While accessing the online archive, scholars, fans, educators and students can choose to use the Mirador image viewer, which facilitates side-by-side comparisons of García Márquez’s evolving literary works. This capability is made possible by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF); with the implementation of IIIF, all images from the online archive are accessible to an international network of IIIF-enabled digital image collections.
“This project is significant, fostering new methods of use and scholarship of archival materials,” said Liz Gushee, head of Digital Collections Services at the Ransom Center. “It provides rights-holder-approved online access to copyright-protected archival materials, opportunities for comparative research and interoperability with other IIIF-compatible online collections. The support from García Márquez’s family made this important project possible.”
Direct to Gabriel García Márquez Digital Collection
Direct to Gabriel García Márquez Digital Collection (in Spanish)
Direct to News Release (in Spanish)
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Read the Complete NY Times Article
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Additional Resources and Background
Direct to Gabriel García Márquez Papers Finding Aid
See Also: Go “Inside the Gabriel García Márquez Archive” (May 12, 2015)
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