A network linking 5,200 storage devices at 386 Mexican universities and libraries went live on Wednesday, offering searches across 780 million publicly available records. Its operators say the system is the largest offline-capable research index in Latin America, built in response to a sudden shortage of affordable cloud storage.
The shortage began in May, when provider NubeNorte told the universities’ shared archive service it would end a low-cost storage contract on 1 August. Replacement offers for the capacity reached 86 million pesos (about €4.5 million) a year, according to the Mexican Council for Digital Memory, which coordinated the project.
From cloud storage to campus servers
The council had 9.6 petabytes of archive space under the old contract. With only a fraction of that capacity available through replacement deals, the group split its searchable collection among servers already held by participating institutions, adding smaller machines bought with emergency grants.
The resulting Índice Nara catalogues 3.4 billion digitised pages, including public records, historical maps, university research and books whose copyright has expired or whose owners have granted open access. Its 2.1 petabytes of data are distributed across 29 states, with search requests routed to available campus nodes.
We had weeks, not years, to decide whether these collections would stay searchable.
Aino A. Tapola, technical coordinator
Tapola said the network can keep serving local queries during an internet interruption, though users may not reach material stored at distant sites until links return. Each participating institution keeps a copy of its own material, while the shared index holds catalogue details and routes readers to the relevant file.
The system’s rules exclude commercial books and other restricted material, a distinction that its designers say protects the project from becoming an unauthorised file-sharing service. Miguel Ángel Pedraza, its systems architect, said every record carries a licence or source reference, and institutions can remove material if its status changes.
A distributed archive tested
The Continental Register of Networked Collections, a nonprofit benchmarking group, confirmed the scale on Wednesday after checking node counts and sample searches. It described the network as the largest Spanish-language public archive index designed to keep working through local internet outages; no comparable system in the region had passed 1,000 nodes.
The shortage also exposed uneven capacity: larger universities contributed hundreds of servers, while some rural libraries could provide only a small local cache. Dorián Z. Molnár, a digital-preservation researcher advising the council, said the model could widen access but would need regular tests to catch broken links and ageing disks.
Tapola said the council will publish quarterly figures on uptime, searches and storage failures, with the first review due in January. It is seeking 140 million pesos (about €7.3 million) to replace the oldest equipment over three years, and has asked state libraries to join without paying a subscription.
