Business cards were an essential element for human relations until a moment in the not-so-distant past. In fact, they played a key role in creating social networks, especially at a time when modern communication technologies (and their means and channels of personal interaction) were not even a dream.

Generally, the cards received were kept arranged alphabetically in a card holder or, in the case of the large amounts handled by an institution, company or organization, in file boxes. This was the case with the collection found in the CDF Archive, which probably belonged to the Library.

The collection includes, primarily but not exclusively, business cards from researchers and scientists from around the world. An analysis of the contents makes it possible to establish a sort of "who's who" of the time, highlighting who were the personalities from the academic world who maintained relations with the CDF, which were the institutions that worked in the Galapagos at an international level (and which were their hierarchies, and which their countries of origin), what internal relationships existed between those actors, in what discipline or field of knowledge did they move, and a long etcetera.

Besides being a useful identification and contact tool, this file box allows to establish a kind of "social map" framed within a particular time period. A map that helps to understand the socio-cultural (and even economic and political) context of the CDF and the Galapagos Islands at a specific point in the past, and to understand who participated in that context, and how.