What is Senderos Digitales?
Description:
As part of the Historia Digital and Práctica Académica Especial en Historia subjects, from the History Department of the Universidad Nacional, a group of undergraduate History students decided to make visible the content of the Archivo Central e Histórico of the university, that is managed by the División de Gestión Documental.
The goal was to get a more comfortable and functional access through a website with digital resources for the description, improving the interaction process with the documentary collectionss that are placed there. In addition, the platform objective is to divulge the archive’s content, to make it more accessible through digital samples of each documentary collection and to promote research.
Digital Public History and Senderos Digitales:
The importance of making archives visible, making them public and letting them available to the community, helps to bring the past of the Universidad Nacional that concerns all of us. The diffusion of acknowledge initiatives from its history let us know the different facets of the UN. Presenting this information in a more readable way is possible with the use of non-traditional formats, to approach the non-specialized public to the Archive. Being in contact with different documents as texts, audios, maps, photographs, etc. proves the necessity of expanding the type of tools in a digital archive.
The use of digital humanities makes sense because, through innovation, creative and collaborative processes that diversify the opportunity of the Archive are encouraged.
ARCHIVO HISTÓRICO Y CENTRAL
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sede Bogotá.
The Archive preserves documents from the alma mater until today. As students of the Universidad Nacional, we remark the importance of letting the community know the information that concerns both to the operation of the institution, as the documents resting on the Archive. These documents are mainly product of donations from individuals or institutions related to the Universidad Nacional.
Historical Collections:
The project approaches to the non-administrative collections, studying only those produced by institutions that were related to the University, for example: the collections from the Centro interamericano de Vivienda - Cinva or the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional - OAN.
There are also some archives from professors or students that have generated impact because of their participation in different processes. For example, Federico Médem, was a zoologist that explored the wildlife of the Colombian East; Yu Takeuchi, was a Japanese mathematician who generated great impact in the Science Faculty; or the Student Press collection, which contain the different publications produced by the student groups.
Each collection has a separate page that informs its content. First, it is shown the description from both, the person or institution as the collection. Second, it is shown the data sheet and finally it is included a digital tool that displays the chosen sample for allowing its divulgation.
Collections display:
Digital tools, developed under free software, wants to facilitate the three proficiencies that Senderos Digitales wants to improve: divulging, displaying and interrogating each collection. Right now, four collections have these tools (Radio Difusora Nacional, Federico Medem, Orlando Fals Borda and Ernesto Guhl), however, as the site is under constant construction and development, we are designing and developing projects to research in a deeper way the content of each collection.