KU librarian races to save record of Ngäbe voices, one fragile page at a time

LAWRENCE — In the late 1980s, a Jesuit priest and a small group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborators gathered for a weekend meeting at a parish in Chiriquí, Panama’s westernmost province near the Costa Rican border. They wanted to talk about the challenges facing the Ngäbe, Panama’s largest Indigenous population. 

Out of that meeting came Drü, a bulletin produced by Acción Cultural Ngäbe, or ACUN, that gave the Ngäbe people a place to discuss their culture, language, land rights and political concerns. In the beginning, it was assembled entirely by hand — photographs, drawings and text physically arranged before each issue was printed and distributed. 

“There was no desktop publishing at that time. Everything was by hand,” said Milton Machuca-Gálvez, University of Kansas Libraries’ librarian for Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American and Caribbean studies. 

Machuca-Galvez helped produce Drü during what he calls some of the happiest years of his life when he was living among and learning from the Ngäbe before graduate school. At the time, reaching many communities required traveling by foot or horseback. Now he’s spent the past year racing to save the unique information and perspectives contained in a decade’s worth of bulletins created by and about the Ngäbe people. 

Machuca-Galvez presented that effort to a packed room Aug. 12 through a project that took him from a Panama City archive last October to a KU repository that will soon make 61 issues of Drü publicly available — a project he called “a labor of love.” 

A trip with a scanner and a deadline 

Drü, which means a shell often used to trumpet or call others, ran from 1988 to 1998, chronicling Ngäbe life through the military dictatorship of Manuel Noriega and the U.S. invasion of Panama. ACUN kept publishing until the bulletin, and a companion publication called Notindio, quietly stopped. Copies scattered. Some were lost. The rest sat fragile and hard to consult, at risk of disappearing for good. 

With support from KU Libraries General Research Funds, Machuca-Gálvez flew to Panama last October carrying an overhead scanner from Kansas — one bulky enough, he joked, that TSA agents wanted to know exactly what it was. He spent roughly a week at ACUN’s office, working from morning to night. 

“I arrived on a Sunday, did all the scanning, and Saturday I was coming back,” he said. 

The Drü collection turned out to be in better shape than he’d feared. Notindio, the companion bulletin’s collection, however, had vanished entirely — a loss Machuca-Gálvez still hopes to solve on a return trip to Panama later this year, along with two missing issues of Drü, numbers 13 and 33. 

“People in ACUN say, ‘I want to buy a lottery ticket with those numbers,’“ he said. 

Finding a “unicorn” 

Digitizing the pages was only half the job. A Sanders Scholars Award was meant to fund the next stage: a KU student who could help organize, describe and prepare the scans for public release. Machuca-Gálvez said he needed someone who understood the project’s larger purpose, could work carefully with unfamiliar materials — and was a native or near-native Spanish speaker. 

By early May, he hadn’t found anyone. 

“There was a moment that I said, ‘No, I better relinquish, and maybe what I’m looking for is a unicorn. I cannot find it,’“ he said. Machuca-Gálvez feared he would have to give up the award entirely. 

Then Miguel Ángel Castro Cano’s name started coming up — from multiple directions, Machuca-Gálvez said, all at once. Castro Cano, a graduate student in architecture at KU who came to Lawrence from Colombia and has worked at the Murphy Art and Architecture Library, joined the project in mid-May. 

“It was like, ‘This is the guy,’“ Machuca-Gálvez said. 

From scans to a searchable archive 

Castro Cano inherited a stack of raw scans and the job of turning them into something usable. He and Machuca-Gálvez initially considered Photoshop before settling on ScanTailor Pro, software built for archival and book materials, to straighten crooked pages, crop uneven borders and correct scanning artifacts without altering the original content. 

“We are not redesigning the publication,” Castro Cano said. “We’re trying to preserve it while making it easier for someone to interact with it digitally.” 

The team settled on a three-stage workflow in consultation with KU Libraries Digitization Coordinator Melissa Mayhew — scan, process and optimize — converting scanner JPEGs to TIFF files, cleaning up each page, then assembling finished issues into searchable, OCR-ready PDFs in Spanish, Ngäbere and, in places, English. 

Cataloging the collection meant adapting standard Dublin Core metadata to fit a publication whose subjects are scattered across dozens of towns rather than one place. Again, leaning on expertise from KU Libraries colleagues, Machuca-Gálvez and Castro Cano consulted with Digital Initiatives Librarian Erin Wolfe and built in a location field for exactly that reason, plus keyword tags by subject rather than a formal controlled vocabulary — a pragmatic choice aimed at researchers who might be searching the archive years from now. 

Ownership stays in Panama 

The project follows what’s known as a postcustodial model: ACUN keeps the original bulletins and retains ownership of the content, while KU Libraries contributes the scanning, metadata and digital infrastructure to make the collection accessible. A memorandum of understanding between the two organizations, modeled on similar agreements, is still being finalized, but once it is completed, the collection will live as an open access publication on KU’s Digital Platform – Journals@KU. 

“They kept everything. I just scanned it,” Machuca-Gálvez said. 

That distinction matters to him. He sees the work as a partnership, not an institution claiming Indigenous materials as its own — and as proof that modest efforts can matter. 

“It’s one of those examples of microhistory,” he said. “Little things sometimes make a difference.” 

For Machuca-Gálvez, paging back through issues he helped assemble decades ago also meant rediscovering material he’d long forgotten, in a language he has spent his career trying to help preserve. 

Both he and Castro Cano described the collaboration as something closer to mentorship than a typical job. Machuca-Gálvez said he tried not to micromanage; Castro Cano said the one-on-one arrangement, working side by side deciding what to correct and what to leave alone, made the summer feel personal in a way a classroom couldn’t. 

“I’m leaving this project with a much better understanding of digitization, digital humanities,” Castro Cano said, “but also with a greater appreciation of the responsibility that comes with preserving and making knowledge accessible.” 

Machuca-Gálvez said he doesn’t see Wednesday’s presentation as an ending. He’s still searching for the missing issues, still hoping to track down the companion bulletin, and already thinking about what a future digitization project — with the workflow he and Castro Cano built — could look like. 

“I don’t really see today as the end of the project,” Castro Cano said. “I see it more as the point where we have established a foundation that other students, researchers and collaborators can build upon.”