Author: Anika Burgess / Source: Atlas Obscura
No matter how small a community or how isolated it is, most have an archive of local history. It might be in the form of public records, or a collection of photographs, or shelves of old books.
On islands, these archives are particularly important. Islands are surprisingly indefinable, occasionally mobile, and, in some cases, can spontaneously grow in size. Island life is similarly diverse and unusual, and these archives help preserve their unique cultures.And some of these islands and their cultures are under threat. Natural disasters, such as hurricanes and volcanoes, can make an isolated island uninhabitable. Man-made disasters, like rising sea levels caused by climate change, can make an island disappear. In these situations, the work of librarians and archivists to safeguard and, where possible, digitize materials, is even more important.
Atlas Obscura spoke to island archives and libraries from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean to learn about their special collections.
Åland Islands
Finland
Population: 28,500
The Åland Islands, sprinkled in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden, number in the thousands—6,700, roughly, of which just 65 are inhabited. They are an autonomous province of Finland, but demilitarized and neutral, with their own flag and postage stamps. The official language is Swedish. (At various points in history, the islands have been part of both Sweden and the Russian Empire.) Around 90 percent of the population resides on Fasta Åland, which is also where the Provincial Archives of Åland are based.
Established in 1978, the archives are impressively large: They hold nearly 15,500 feet worth of records (3.2 percent of which have been digitized, according to chief archivist Åke Söderlund), along with a library of books on the Ålands, more than 11,000 volumes strong. Their oldest records date to the early 17th century. The booklet above was printed as a supplement to a Swedish newspaper in 1916, a year before the Russian Revolution, and five years before Finland was awarded sovereignty over the islands by the League of Nations.
Cook Islands
Population: 17, 497
The Cook Islands Library and Museum is located in Rarotonga, the most populous of the 15 Cook Islands. (The least populous is Suwarrow, a designated national park whose two caretakers leave during the cyclone season.) Its closest Pacific neighbors are Tonga, French Polynesia, and New Zealand, the country it is most closely associated with. The Cook Islands are self-governing in “free association” with New Zealand, meaning that the residents are New Zealand citizens.
The Library and Museum holds “couple of diaries written by early European settlers from the early 1900s and the cession document [1891] to Britain,” says Jean Mason, the director and curator of the Library and Museum. It also has a lending library and artifacts that include a Cook Islands stamp collection and some historical photographs. Its goal is to preserve the history, heritage, and culture of the Cook Islands, which sometimes requires specific treatment. Books and artifacts can occasionally become infested with pests, and so a few times a year, the Library and Museum wrap and seal the items, and then freeze them. They’ve used both a household freezer and a larger walk-in freezer, courtesy of the Cook Islands Trading Corporation supermarket.
Orkney Islands
Scotland
Population: 21,349
The Orkney Islands—an archipelago of around 70 islands, 20 of which are inhabited—are situated off the blustery northeast coast of Scotland, in the North Sea. In the town of Kirkwall, on the main island, called Mainland, is the Orkney Photographic Archive, part of the Orkney Library & Archive. The archive is impressively large: It contains 60,000 photographs, from the 1870s to the present, documenting the history and culture of Orkney.
The collection began in 1976 with around…
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