Harry Ransom Center To Digitize Famed Author's Archives

DOWNTOWN AUSTIN-UT, TX -- The Harry Ransom Center housed at the University of Texas at Austin has been awarded a project to digitize the personal papers of famed author Gabriel García Márquez.

The Council of Library and Information Resources tapped the center for the work, which involves digitizing more than 24,000 pages from the author’s archives. Harry Ransom officials posted the news on their website.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the award is aimed at making digitized content easily accessible to the public. The $126,730 grant allows the Ransom Center to make thousands of images from the late author’s archives available online.

The project has been given a title containing the nickname of the beloved author: “Sharing ‘Gabo’ with the World: Building the Gabriel García Márquez Online Archive from His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center.”

The work involves the scanning of documents, notebooks, scrapbooks, photographs and assorted ephemera from the writer’s archives. The materials date from 1950 to 2013.

Born in 1927, the Colombia-born Márquez began his writing career as a journalist. He would later go on to write some of the last century’s most acclaimed novels, particularly “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which led to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.

The author died in Mexico City in April 2014.