Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
Use of Data
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The Biblioteca Virtual del Banco de la República was created in 1997 by the Red de Bibliotecas del Banco de la República (the cultural network of Colombia's central bank). It emerged out of the broader mission of the Banco de la República's cultural wing — known as Banrepcultural — to make the collections of the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango and allied institutions accessible online to the Colombian public and researchers worldwide. The digital collections portal (accessible at babel.banrepcultural.org) was developed under the direction of the library beginning in the mid-1990s, following a concerted effort to digitize the Colombian cultural heritage and leverage the internet for academic research.
The Biblioteca Virtual hosts an extensive and growing collection of digitized materials in multiple formats: books, magazine and journal articles, photographs, illustrations, maps, newspapers, audio and video files, interactive pages, online exhibitions, and thematic educational projects. Collections are primarily focused on Colombia or works by Colombian authors, though international materials are also represented. Major digital collections include pre-Columbian archaeological documentation, the Gold Museum collection, numismatic holdings (inaugurated 1961), a philatelic collection of over 470,000 postal items from approximately 230 regions, and digitized historical manuscripts and rare books from private collections. A special collection documents the travels of Spanish writer José María Gutiérrez de Alba through Colombia between 1870 and 1884.
The Biblioteca Virtual hosts a significant periodicals archive (Hemeroteca Luis López de Mesa), which is an extensive collection of Colombian newspapers and magazines spanning multiple historical periods. This archive is a primary resource for researchers studying the history of the Colombian press and media. The portal also includes digitized versions of the cultural journal Credencial Historia and other Banrepcultural serial publications.
All content in the Biblioteca Virtual is freely accessible online from anywhere in the world. The portal supports browsing by thematic collections and full-text search. Some restricted datasets may require institutional membership or registration. The system uses CONTENTdm as its digital collections platform and supports OAI-PMH harvesting for interoperability with other repositories. The Biblioteca Virtual is part of the broader Banrepcultural network, which operates 23 additional libraries, cultural centers, and museums across Colombia.