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Days af­ter the Bar­ba­dos gov­ern­ment’s an­nounce­ment that it had pur­chased the Banyan archives from T&T, the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) has re­vealed it is work­ing on a dig­i­tal archive meant to pre­serve To­ba­go’s his­to­ry.

Speak­ing ex­clu­sive­ly with Guardian Me­dia at Car­ifes­ta XV in Bar­ba­dos, Sec­re­tary of Tourism, Cul­ture, An­tiq­ui­ties & Trans­porta­tion Tashia Bur­ris said THA of­fi­cials are work­ing on a dig­i­tal her­itage archive.

She said, “We have tons of footage, we have old VHS tapes, we have CDs, we have peo­ple who have record­ed his­to­ry in their hous­es. We still have a lot of our knowl­edge bear­ers alive that were able to record the sto­ries live and to be able to pre­serve them in a data­base and a cloud set­up that is de­signed for stor­age of those kinds of repli­cas of our his­to­ry. And for me, that is crit­i­cal be­cause if we don’t do that, we’re go­ing to lose that. We’re go­ing to lose that his­to­ry.”