If you'd want it to learn about Aruba, the small Caribbean island nation that sits just north of Venezuela,

you'd probably be surprised by how much information is out there.

On one centralized website, you can scroll through basically every piece of the country's history.

So really old books, really old newspapers, you know, there have been printed newspapers

on the island for like 300 years.

There's also a really great collection of vintage postcards that I've sort of

screen-shotted as like they just have good vibes. That's Kate Nibbs, a senior writer at Wired.

She recently wrote about Aruba's efforts

to digitize their archives.

It's just a very sort of sprawling collection.

I think there is actually as many documents in the Aruba collection as there are people who live in Aruba, which is cool.

You can look up pretty much any document or artifact from the year 1499 to the present.

There's your standard books and newspaper articles plus images from the country's

archaeology museum, even videos like one we kept watching of what looked like a pretty

rock and carnival from 1980. I really want to go to Aruba now. It's a very effective guerrilla tourism campaign really.

You wouldn't think a library would be the thing that lures you to the Caribbean but there you go.

Yeah, I mean it might be a tourism campaign aimed at dorks, but I'm hooked.

This database of hundreds of years of history exists online because of a partnership with a small nonprofit called the Internet Archive.

They worked with Aruba to digitize just about every historical

document the island had. I mean, is this typical that a small country like Aruba has, you know, a

comprehensive digital history available all over the world online?

No, and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write about the partnership that they struck with the Internet archive because I think it provides a really

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