The archives of Ibicaba plantation, Brazil (1846-1977): New sources of microdata & guidelines on creating physical and digital collections from rural archives

The Ibicaba Project was an initiative in the overlapping fields of economic and business history, cultural heritage preservation, and digital humanities to create a new physical and digital collection for Ibicaba, one of Brazil’s most important historical plantations. This paper first presents the contents of the ensuing digital archive, the Ibicaba Collection. Its 205 digital objects, totalling ca. 65,000 digitized pages, refer primarily to accounting and managerial records of that plantation’s labor and rural management between 1846 and 1977. High frequency microdata on labor productivity and remuneration, household budgets, consumption prices, output and input costs, and asset prices are now readily available for crucial historical junctures, including the pioneering hirings of European indentured laborers to coffee plantations and Brazil’s immediate post-Abolition era. Paucity of similar microdata remains a bottleneck for new advancements in quantitative historical research in low- and middle-income countries. Material conservation is crucial to safeguard unique sources that are currently unknown even to official repositories, while their digitalization eliminates barriers to scholarly research. To support similar efforts in material and digital conservation of interest to economic history, this paper further documents the protocols of the Ibicaba Project for creating new in situ collections with rural archives and producing high quality digital surrogates for online publication. Under strict safety measures for personnel and sources, this paper describes all steps necessary for documental surveying, preventive conservation (mechanical cleaning, de-metalization, planification, minor repairs, and in situ storage), and digitalization (image capturing, metadata production, and digital storage) of rural archives.