King Charles III had a problem. For several centuries, Spain had been financing a vast network of exploration. The great nodes of this network were men like Columbus, Pizarro, and Cortez. As they pushed deeper into the Americas, the accounts of their explorations and conquests produced a modern-day phe-nomenon: prodigious amounts of paperwork.

There were letters, maps, shipping manifests, treaties, diaries, drawings, even rudimentary Indian language dictionaries-exceedingly valuable information both as historical record and as administrative tools for future foreign intrigues. But data, then as now, was a multisourced, unruly thing. So, to centralize and preserve Spain's legacy, Charles decreed in 1785 the founding of a national archive in Seville.

It resides there to this day in a sixteenth century building, housing the world's greatest collection of documents on the discovery, exploration, subjugation, and administration of the Americas. The Indias Archive has grown prodigiously since its inception; its stately rooms are now lined with six miles of shelves groaning under 90 million pages of historical materials.

The idea of computerizing this unwieldy national treasure was first pondered in 1986. The project was undertaken in anticipation of the 1992 quintcentennial observance of history's most significant sea journey. Supporting the project was a partnership comprised of the archive, the Ramon Areces Foundation (a private foundation named for the founder of Spain's largest corporation), and IBM Spain. The partners agreed to share the cost of the automation, which would top $10 million and would require the successful blending of the skills of historians, archivists, and computer professionals.

The task facing them was daunting. The archive's operation was an administrative ordeal. Everything was done manually, and, with the volume of documents, finding the correct one could take weeks and sometimes months. Additionally, the items most frequently referenced, such as letters from Christopher Columbus, were being damaged by repetitive handling.

Enter the AS/400: two hundred and seven years later, a princely answer to a king's problem.

"The first step," said Juan Pedro Secilla, the affable director of networkcentric computing for IBM Spain and project manager for the archive venture, "was to develop AS/400-based administrative software." That part was relatively simple and provided archivists a measure of control over ongoing research activities.

"Next," Secilla explained, "we created an SQL/DB2 relational database of all the catalogs, inventories, and indices of archived materials." That had an immediate and dramatic impact on the user-friendliness of the archive. Secilla related the story of a Chilean congressman who had searched the archives for two months tracing his ancestral lineage. Using the AS/400, his daughter was able to identify the supporting documents literally in seconds.

Still, the problem of handling the documents remained. Secilla's solution was to create an image database of the most frequently requested documents. "As you can imagine," Secilla quipped, "you can't just jam a 500-year-old document into the sheet feeder of a standard black and white scanner." For one thing, the documents weren't black and white. Many were stained and faded and cracked, recorded on assorted materials in a variety of inks. Secilla settled on a Xerox flatbed scanner with 256 gray levels per pixel. Over a three-year period, 30 people lovingly scanned nine million pages of historical documents onto 5,000 optical disks.

The pages were captured at 100 dpi and stored in compressed form with 16 gray levels. Uncompressed, each image requires 1MB of storage; compressed, it reduces to 3KB. Nonetheless, the complete database required 3 terabytes (TB) of storage.

By the time Columbus and his cohorts were safely digitized, the archive had a 16MB token-ring network with an AS/400 E50 acting as database server, administrative server, printer server, and visual archive server to a network of 40 IBM PS/2 workstations running OS/2 WARP. For archive users, the AS/400 provided the crucial link between the computerized indices and catalogues and the location of the desired image in the optical disk library.

Imaging provided some formidable advantages for the 16,000 researchers who annually troll this ocean of archival flotsam. To an impressive degree, computers were able to reverse the ravages of time that made documents difficult to read. "Special algorithms were developed to produce a palette of processes that allow computerized images to be cleaned," explained Secilla. Stains can be eliminated, contrast can be sharpened on faded or bleeding inks, documents can be rotated, and a zoom feature allows enlargement of problematic sections of manuscript. "And the 'improved' image can then be printed and taken offsite for further study."

To enhance the response time of the system, another algorithm predicts the pages likely to be accessed next and preloads them, decompressed, into RAM. At present, the process of loading optical disks is manual, but Secilla is contemplating using robotics to manage the extensive image library. The disks could reside in a series of jukeboxes under control of the AS/400, he explained.

Oddly, one of the most difficult parts of the project was cabling the building. The archive itself is a historical treasure protected by the government. "We couldn't just drill holes in the walls," recalled Secilla. "Putting the cabling together was quite a challenge."

The Archivo General de Indias, as it is known in Spain, has won international acclaim in the form of the prestigious Erasmus Prize. The Dutch annually present an award of 10,000 guilders (about $6,500 but considerably more celebrity) to the individual or institution whose work best "preserves the spiritual and cultural values of Europe." The computerization of the archive was specifically cited. At home, it has been honored with Spain's highest cultural decoration.

Digitization of archive records continues, and today, 12 million documents, which represent one-third of the most frequently requested folios, are online. "The model has been so successful that Portugal and Moscow have shown interest in replicating it," Secilla proudly reported. An AS/400 may soon take up residence in the archives of Communism International in the heart of the former Evil Empire. One can scarcely imagine what historic horrors dwell in the vaults of that repository.

I asked Secilla if the Indias Archive had considered making Internet access available. The archive, he explained, had tested remote inquiry, establishing a trial link to Pasadena for two weeks. But image retrieval was slow, and bandwidth was the limiting factor for remote access and Internet gateways.

The value of the Indias Archive lies, in great part, in the extraordinary perspective it offers on the conduct of human affairs. Columbus and the explorers who followed in his wake were unarguably brave and remarkable men. While a boon to the colonial ambitions of Europe, they were also unarguably a plague to the indigenous peoples of the "new world" whom they enslaved, slaughtered, and infected in staggering numbers.

National colonialism is all but a historic footnote. But, in many parts of the world, the same forces that drove the original explorers-trade and coveting resources-have created strikingly similar conditions. Nearly 1,000 indigenous cultures still exist-a goodly number, ironically, in the Americas-and all are in conflict with the expanding industrial economy, which is insatiable in its demand for resources. It is the great contribution of the computer that allows us to capture and preserve the richness of our history, as superbly exemplified in the Archivo General de Indias, where we can not only find the inspiration of our own greatness, but know the price of our excess.

Victor Rozek has 17 years of experience in the data processing industry, including seven years with IBM in Operations Management and System Engineering. He can be reached by E-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..