Introduction

Overview

The Harvester for Creating Knowledge Streams in the Americas Project coordinated by the Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII) at the University of New Mexico (UNM), addresses the challenge of identifying and maintaining stable and reliable Internet access to library and institutional collections and digitized archives in and about Latin America. The project is building a Latin America Knowledge Harvester (LAKH) that identifies and indexes multidisciplinary Latin American content collections. LAKH offers researchers a searchable interface pointing to institutional repositories that permit access to their contents based on Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The project goal is to stimulate new Latin America scholarship through the use of the portal and the formation of cross-disciplinary and multilingual knowledge communities.

LAKH accesses a broad, multidisciplinary, OAI community of Latin America content comprised of acclaimed providers at UNM and Latin American partners with rare and previously under utilized collections and works in progress from or about Latin America. The partner collections selected for this Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) project focus on key areas of scientific research and cultural production that originate in Latin America with relevance to current scholarship, teaching, and social issues in the United States and the rest of the world.

The universities participating in this first stage project are the University of New Mexico (UNM), the University of Guadalajara (Universidad de Guadalajara, UG),the Brazilian Science and Technology Information Institute (Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnoloia (IBICT), the State University of Campinas (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, UNICAMP), and the Simon Bolivar University (Universidad Simón Bolívar, USB). The Harvester for Creating Knowledge Streams in the Americas project supports the development of Institutional Repositories (IR) at each of the participant universities and establishes reciprocal paths for sharing information between US and Latin American institutions.

UNM is ideally situated to implement cutting edge technology for open access to scholarly materials that will expand USA-Latin America research, teaching, and understanding. It is home to a long-running federally designated National Resource Center on Latin America for teaching, research and outreach, an Institutional Repository of Open Archived materials at the UNM Libraries, the Division of Iberian and Latin American Resources and Services (DILARES), with one of the premier Latin America library collections in the US, the LAII/Latin America Data Base on-line news service and archives, the Latin American Social Medicine (LASM) on-line archive of abstracts, the National Sciences Foundation (NSF)-funded Consortium of the Americas for Interdisciplinary Science (CAIS), and the Ibero-American Science Technology and Education Consortium (ISTEC). UNM seeks to increase the number of Latin American partners in LAKH among institutions of higher education, libraries, archives, and museums, during next stages of the project.

Knowledge Areas

The Latin American Knowledge Harvester (LAKH) harvests streams of Latin America full-text content from the Institutional Repositories (IR) that participate in the Harvester for Creating Knowledge Streams in the Americas project.

In its initial stages LAKH harvests content in the following areas:

  • Contemporary News and Data About Latin America
  • Curriculum Resources for Teaching on Latin America
  • Latin American History
  • Latin American Indigenous Cultures
  • Latin American Photographs and Images
  • New Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Latin America
  • Social Medicine and Public Health in Latin America
  • Works in Progress in Latin America

Initial content providers have the following profile:

  1. The UNM is a USA Department of Education designated, Hispanic-Serving Institution and a Carnegie Research I University. Situated on the US Southwest border, the UNM, through several departments such as the Latin American & Iberian Institute (LAII) has formal cooperation agreements with 57 institutions in Ibero-America. UNM University Libraries house the third largest Latin American library collection in the USA. The UNM is a nexus of resources for teaching and researching about Latin America. As nearly 30% of its students are Hispanic and 12% are Native American, the UNM has strong ties to K-12 Education, to Latino and Indigenous communities, and the institutions that serve those communities.
    • UNM has the longest-running internet news service in the U.S. on Latin America in its LAII/Latin American Data Base (LADB) and has the proven capacity to gather and archive the content of Latin American news media. LADB produces three weekly news bulletins about Latin America in original articles in English, with all sources listed. LADB contributes teaching modules with links to additional curriculum resources, study suggestions for LADB news stories, a searchable database, and lesson plans about Latin America. LADB Resources for Teaching About the Americas (RetaNet) website receives over one million hits per year from K-12 Education teachers, coordinated with the Center for Latin American Resources and Outreach (CLARO). LADB has Images/Photographs of Latin America and Brazilian Photos collections, available for teaching activities.
    • The UNM Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center (HSLIC) is recognized as a leader in the USA for its successful outreach services to rural, Latino and Native American communities for providing health information, education and services. It has partnered with faculty in the UNM Department of Family and Community Medicine to establish a proven track record in gathering, abstracting, and disseminating Latin American social medicine journals in the Latin American Social Medicine (LASM) pilot project. In addition, HSLIC has worked on a similar program for Native American research. LASM Data Base has been abstracting seminal Health Sciences and Public Health journal articles in three languages: English, Spanish, and Portuguese. It has allowed access to a largely unknown medical literature that addresses problems relevant to current medicine, public health, and health care delivery; provided models for librarian-health care provider collaboration and new roles for health sciences librarians; and communicated lessons learned from these experiences through the peer-reviewed professional literature.
    • UNM’s project participants have valuable experience with Open Archives Initiative (OAI) electronic archiving and dissemination of materials. UNM is known for its innovation and training of Latin American libraries in open archives services, research and development, and technology transfer.
  2. Universidad de Guadalajara (UG) is a multi-campus university based in Mexico’s second-largest city, with internationally recognized curricula and research centers in the humanities and social sciences, aquatic ecology, and social medicine. Inside the UG, the Health Sciences University Center (Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud) is developing along with its UNM partner an important Latin American Social Medicine Data Base (LASM). Nine Latin American journals from Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia have been selected for this project. This phase is funded by the TICFIA program, managed by the UNM/LAII. The Mexican team has received support from the Pan American Health Office (PAHO) of Mexico, and both UG and UNM teams have financial and logistic support from the University Health Sciences Center (CUCS) of the University of Guadalajara and the HSC-UNM.
  3. Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB) has well-developed professional schools and the core arts and sciences curriculum. USB holds an important historical collection in its Bolivarium Institute of History Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas Bolivarium). Since 1983 the Bolivarium has been dedicated to researching, publishing, and disseminating the works of Simón Bolívar and to the study of the Colonial and Independence periods of history in Venezuela and the continent. The Simón Bolívar Archives contain approximately 243 volumes of more than 109,000 folios, several of them already available in its Papyrus Collection (Colección Papiro). The Institute currently issues the Annals of Bolivarian Studies (Anuario de Estudios Bolivarianos), and has a database of issues with 40,000 listings, which soon will be on the web. In addition, the Bolivarium is processing 86 folders of documentation from the Mayoralty of the City of Valencia (Alcaldía del Municipio de Valencia). The Bolivarium exchanges information with more than 200 history centers in Venezuela and around the world
  4. Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (IBICT). The Brazilian Institute of Science and Technology Information is an institute of the Ministry of Science and Technology. It is a prominent player in the Open Access movement and scientific publishing arena. IBICT is the world’s oldest information science organization celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2003. IBICT launched the Brazilian Manifest in Support of Open Access to Scientific Information in September, 2005. The institute publishes a respected electronic journal in information science, Ciência da Informação, as well as supporting other innovative e-journals. (see http://www.ibict.br/cienciadainformacao/) IBICT encouraged the unprecedented drive to create a Digital Library for Thesis and Dissertations (EDT) in Brazil. The Brazilian EDT collections in LAKH currently include about 60 thousand records from more than 60 Brazilian universities and higher education institutes.