The historical archive of El Comercio is launched digitally at FIL Lima 2023: Why is this important for Peru?

Digitizing 184 years of journalistic activity is a daunting task. If already in the 70s the newspaper El Comercio had its pages recorded on microfilm for the consultation of its journalists, it is in recent years, in silent work during the time of the pandemic, that our historical archive took a new technological leap with digitization from its first printed issue on May 4, 1839.

The project, conceived by Silvia Miró Quesada, allows not only the permanent conservation of its information, but also its use among the readers of El Comercio. As Juan Aurelio Arévalo Miró Quesada points out, this initiative involved a large economic investment, in addition to a year and a half of work, with 20 people dedicated exclusively to digitization, in close collaboration with our archive professionals. A month, an average of 120,000 pages was recorded. In total, the more than 2,000 volumes preserved in the newspaper’s newspaper library will soon be within reach.

And the Lima International Book Fair will be the place where not only will the project be presented in society, but the public will be invited to browse this archive accessible from the stand of the newspaper El Comercio. On the screens, readers will be able to search for any desired date (from 1839 to today), enter key words, and even search for the cover of the Diary published on the day of their birth, ready to print and take with them. It is an interactive stand, where information will also be offered on the benefits of being a subscriber to El Comercio.

“When this Journal was born, Peru had barely 18 years of independent life. You cannot understand our republican history without knowing an archive that not only keeps the most important facts, but details of the daily life of Peruvians: their cooking recipes, their leisure, cultural or sports activities. It is an immense material to discover”, explains Arévalo.

The next step will be to prepare a friendly platform that allows students to access the digital archive from their homes or schools, with the possibility of downloading the pages and sharing them, a development that is expected to be activated in the coming months.

A partner in the dissemination of the historical archive is the endearing actor Gonzalo Torres, who stars in a second season of “Cuenta la historia”, a web series produced by El Comercio. “We wanted to develop a closer and more emotional bond between our readers and our archive. And Gonzalo is the ideal person”, explains our journalistic director, highlighting the driver’s experience in front of the “A la vuelta de la esquina” program.

Thus, the newspaper invited the actor to dive into the archive and tell his stories. After an intense season of 10 episodes, a more ambitious second season is now coming, with animations and recording outdoors. For Torres, this experience has allowed him to get more involved with our historical newspaper library. “It is definitely a very important heritage for the history of republican Peru. For people who are bookworms or newspaper archives, like me, it is a luxury to have an archive that has been kept in such a condition”, says the actor.

Indeed, although the commonplace proclaims that Peruvians have a short memory, our interest in the stories of the historical archive are, for Torres, a consequence of this forgetfulness. “The Peruvian is always trying to connect with his memory. That is why what I try is that all this information, some apparently banal, always have a link with the present. Revealing how the past can have astonishing connections with our present time”, adds Torres.