Send message to Author

Long abstract:

Researchers and scholars of what's known as the “recent past" have bloomed in Argentina, as studies of military coups and revisionism of our recent history became mainstream in our country. Being so close in time, one might be tempted to think that sources and historical documents are somewhat readily available, and while that may be true about official documents, there are a whole host of documents produced by NGOs, social organisations, unions, and other actors of the era scattered around in private archives that risk being lost.

As part of a project funded by CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council), I had the privilege to work on and contribute to the *Centro Digital de Documentación Histórica del Instituto de Humanidades* (Digital Center of Historical Documentation of the Institute of Humanities) which was tasked with providing a harbour for these kinds of documents. Our hope with this endeavour is to provide reliable original sources for researchers of all fields who are interested in investigating the period that began with the march 1976 coup and its lingering influence after democracy was restored in 1983.

This paper aims to detail part of the process, focusing on issues and strategies that were employed for ensuring availability of the archive, aided in no small part by the Office of Open Knowledge of our University, which adheres to and upholds the “open science” and “open access” banners with a strong belief that having these documents online allows for "democratisation" of knowledge.