Galapagueana (gah-lah-pah-geh-AH-nah, name inspired by Europeana) is a digital platform maintained by the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), aimed at recovering, managing and disseminating the cultural heritage and the social and scientific memory of the Galapagos Islands.

Through the use of techniques and methodologies belonging to the disciplines of knowledge and memory management (library science, archival science and museology), plus the use of digital tools, Galapagueana intends to recover, organize, make visible and disseminate a series of documents that have to do mainly with the history of science in the archipelago, but also with the social memory of its inhabitants.

Social memory is the sum of the memories of a human group or collective over time. It is a fabric made of hundreds of thousands of small and large threads that allows us to understand the past and present of a community, build its identity and write its history.

As a result of a long and conscientious research and curation process, Galapagueana presents nine main sections, listed in the dropdown menu at the navigation bar. Their contents are updated every four months and are distributed through social networks and other communication channels. In those nine sections (and, in some of them, in their corresponding subsections) documents belonging mostly to the collections of the CDF Library, Archive & Museum are exhibited, but also items from external institutions and individuals who have decided to share or donate their own materials.

The contents of Galapagueana are structured around a chronology: a timeline that allows the assemblage of all the elements around a common axis. They are complemented by a historical bibliography which provides a solid bibliographic foundation.

Galapagueana proposes an approach to cultural heritage in general and documentary heritage in particular from below, from the margins ― and even from an anecdotal perspective. It encourages a conversation among documents of different categories, and tries to put aside the artificial barriers imposed by disciplines such as archival and library sciences. The released documents usually have a direct relationship with the work of the CDF and its scientists, but also with the life and tasks of the Galapagoan community, and with the territory that this community occupies.

The ultimate goal of Galapagueana is to recover, understand and disseminate the islands' memory in order to create a record of their history, understand Galapagos' challenges and opportunities, value all the past and present experiences, and build, from that point, paths for the future.

Coordinator & contact

The person in charge of Galapagueana is Edgardo Civallero, coordinator of the Library, Archive & Museum of the Charles Darwin Foundation between 2018 and 2023. Civallero is a librarian and knowledge manager, with a degree in Library Science and Documentation, and a specialization in Epistemologies of the South. A professor, researcher, lecturer and writer, he works with memory, identity, audiovisual collections and information management, and with the dialogue between libraries, archives and museums to build new knowledge and recover old stories. He has acquired considerable experience in social librarianship; in working with libraries on the margins; in library services for indigenous peoples and subordinate groups; in ethnomusicological bibliographic research; and in the management of oral tradition and threatened sounds (languages and music). In addition, he is an editorial designer, translator, and text editor. At present, his work focuses on open science, citizen science, sustainability and degrowth; in the semantic web, linked data, ontologies, metadata and knowledge classification; in the design of digital libraries and specialized information services; and in preservation, conservation and digitization of heritage collections.

The contact email is edgardo.civallero (at) fcdarwin.org.ec.

Licenses & copyright

Galapagueana is a space for the dissemination of knowledge and memory. Its contents are presented for free consultation and circulation, as long as the corresponding rights and licenses, indicated below, are respected.

Unless otherwise indicated, all copyrights and other intellectual property rights, as well as the rest of the rights over the content of Galapagueana correspond to the respective original authors of the textual, visual and audiovisual materials presented in the different sections, and the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands as depositary and / or manager of those documents.

Likewise, provided that nothing else is indicated, all the materials presented in Galapagueana are disseminated through a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivative Work (by-nc-nd) 4.0 license. This implies that the material can be copied and redistributed in any medium or format as long as the authorship (author and source) is properly acknowledged, it is not used for a commercial purpose, and the derivative work is not disseminated.

Participate & collaborate

Galapagueana is a space open to the public in general, and the Galapagos' community in particular. While it focuses primarily on materials managed by the CDF Library, Archive & Museum, it also intends to include documents belonging to people and institutions outside the CDF who wish to share their own materials and stories, connect them with many others, and make them visible.

If you want to collaborate with Galapagueana, please contact us via the email provided above.

Support us

Galapagueana is a labor-intensive project that is entirely dependent on donor funding. If you want to support this project, please contact us via the email provided above.