courtesy of: The Morning News
The Arubiana Department of the Aruba Public Library is working on the digitization of three newspapers that were in circulation on the island for many years during the past century. The first of these is the “Observador: Semanario Informativo Netamente Arubiano” which was dedicated to the interest of the Aruban public. The other paper is, “Aruba: Noticiero Official di Gobierno (Insular),” and the third paper is: “Aruba: Orgaan van de Voorlichtingsdienst van het Eilandgebied Aruba,” which was an official Dutch language publication. These papers circulated between 1957 and 1984. The Public Library’s Arubiana Department has decided to scan these publications page by page and make them accessible online. The publications provide valuable historical information of Aruba and may be used as important research material.
The Observador was published for the first time back in 1935. Later it appeared again on the market from 1961 to 1965. It was published in Papiamento and at one point also contained an English language section. It was a publication geared to the interest of everyone. It also gave same attention to the cultural life of Aruba. "Aruba: Noticiero Official di Gobierno (Insular)", was a government publication designed to inform the general public about the different projects, jobs and activities of the government.
A major portion of the work of scanning these publications is completed, and very soon each publication will be available online. The publications may be accessed via the website of the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), http://www.dloc. com. Go to the ‘home page’ and click ‘partners’ then go to ‘Biblioteca Nacional Aruba’ and click the ‘all items’ tab. Persons searching for articles, announcements or photos of Aruba for the period 1943 to 1985 will find all of these on the same website. For some time now it has been possible to search for approximately 837 issues on this particular website. The digitalization of the Aruba Esso News and the three other publications mentioned are published in cooperation with The Digital Library of the Caribbean and the Aruba Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional Aruba). The Aruba Esso News of the past century was a well known news source on Aruba especially written for the Lago Oil Refinery community.
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative of digital libraries of resources related to the Caribbean. dLOC offers access to digital versions of cultural, historic and investigative material concerning the Caribbean, which are currently stored in archives, libraries and private collections. Researchers in search of information and news of Curacao and of the other islands of the past century, can consult Amigoe online. Amigoe, The Curacao Gazette of the Curacaose Courant is accessible at http://kranten.kb.nl. It is possible to search some 1500 newspapers from Holland, Netherlands Antilles, Surinam and Nederlands-Indie via a variety of key words. Several million pages are available covering the period from 1618 to 1995. The digitization is an initiative of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Holland: http//kranten.kb.nl.
