The Gabriel García Márquez Digital Collection at UT Austin
Prepare for a boon in research and teaching about the famous author of 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel laureate (1982) who passed away in 2014. The brilliance of García Márquez has rocked Latin American literary history for many decades.
More than 27,000 images from his family’s archive have been digitized and published on line by the University of Texas at Austin, along with 22 scrapbooks and notebooks, a memoir, screenplays, and all of the Colombian author’s works of fiction. As if this were not enough, there will be more to come!
This digital collection, with materials in English and Spanish, opened to researchers in 2015, and it quickly became a favorite of scholars in Texas. But to have it accessible on the Internet will boost its reach exponentially. UT was fortunately to have the massive digitization project underwritten by a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, funded in turn by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A huge team has been accomplishing the task of conserving materials, digitizing them, and preparing the online interface. The García family also gave their support to the project, excited to anticipate its potentially wide distribution.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History will be including an analytical essay about this digital collection. It is being contracted with Professor Pedro García-Caro (Romance Languages, University of Oregon), who teaches an entire seminar about García Márquez. We look forward to hearing how he will incorporate digital resources into his next seminar.
Stephanie Wood
(Photo of the author available from WikiMedia through Creative Commons.)