The discovery, digitisation and forthcoming publication of Guatemala’s Police Archives from during the 36 year conflict is one of the most inspiring, remarkable achievements in human rights work. As a strategic information resource for those seeking redress, the archive’s mind-boggling scale, level of detail, relevance, and the deep skills needed to make it accessible, really show the need for informatics, archiving and social science professionals in human rights work. IÂ feel very lightweight just looking at the work that’s been done there.
This month, the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman released “The Right to Know” (Spanish, PDF, ~10mb), its first analytical paper drawing on the contents of the 11 million documents which have been already scanned and indexed. The Ombudsman also intends to make some 7 million scans from the archives freely available to the public, a Google-scale undertaking in access to information. Some of the analytical work done on the archives recently led to the arrest of Héctor Roderico RamÃ
Related posts:
Anybody interested in this issue should check out the documentary The Atrocity Archives, although somebody at the BBC has been reading too much Charles Stross.