About

Soledad Acosta de Samper Digital Library

This library was developed by Universidad de los Andes and the National Library of Colombia. Its purpose is to gather the complete work of the author and offer open access to the whole of it. Acosta’s wide and varied production was digitalized in 2013 within the framework of Soledad Acosta de Samper Year celebrations, which allowed the joining of technological and investigative efforts by the BNC, the Universidad de los Andes and the Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

The library wants to be a repository that allows access to her work in a coherent and rigorous way both to researchers and to wider audiences. In the last two decades, Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913) has gone from being an almost forgotten author to being recognized as one of the most important writers of the 19th century, both at a national and international level. Since the beginning of the 21st century, research has led to consistent editorial projects that have given back Soledad Acosta de Samper the place she had in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Our digital library wants to restore the broad authorial context of the recent editions of her work, in order to offer readers, either specialized or not, a repository to navigate to their liking, with access to full texts. The library also makes visible the diverse and complex intellectual journeys of the author and her century.

The collections are organized according to the format of the works (manuscripts, press, books and scrapbooks), and,also, according to the genres and disciplines in which they can be classified. We know that all classification is provisional and that compartmentalization, although it allows for certain explorations, tends to be a stumbling block for curiosity and the transversal and interdisciplinary routes that are the sign of our times. We hope that students and researchers will contribute to keep this collection alive, proposing new routes and communication networks between texts that have never really been isolated from each other. This is exactly what a digital library makes possible.

This digital library opened in October 2019 with 570 titles. In the first months of 2021, several more titles were included to reach 652, thanks to new press digitalizations carried out by the BNC. We hope to include in 2022 recent acquisitions of the Luis Ángel Arango Library, as well as the collection of letters that rests in the Library of the Gimnasio Moderno de Bogotá.