E-Views and Reviews: Latino Literature Online

By Cheryl LaGuardia -- Library Journal, 9/1/2004

Results are in from my wholly unscientific survey questions in the June 15 LJ: "What's the single most important consideration driving your acquisition of an e-resource?" and "What kind of library do you work in?" Of the 328 responses, 167 came from academic librarians, 116 from public librarians, and 45 from special librarians. There was no single, outstanding "most important consideration," but definite patterns emerged.

Among public librarians "easy remote access" was the top vote-getter in acquiring an e-resource. Their second most quoted reason was "meeting patrons' needs well," which I translate into "content." For academic and special libraries, "content" was most frequently named as the most important consideration. Budget was the underlying leitmotif for all. "No matter how fabulous the source and how much we want it, if the price is high we may not be able to acquire it," one respondent said. Other issues included the interdisciplinary nature of a file (something that meets multiple subject needs), flexible and fair licensing (Alexander Street Press was lauded repeatedly in this area), powerful searchability, and the publisher's reputation/track record.

Quote of the week "Sage Publications is not focused on the preservation of the journals business; we are focused on the preservation of scholarly research. Thus, as the academic community moves online, Sage moves online.... We are embracing the electronic future because electronic publishing and distribution is the future of scholarly publishing. The present generation of students and the next generation of faculty members, who came of age with the Internet, go into the stacks only if they can do so virtually. As a premier publisher of scientific research, Sage is obliged to make research materials available to researchers in the medium of their choice."—Blaise Simqu, President and CEO of Sage Publications

The Next Big Thing? CrossRef Search could answer the dreams of librarians and researchers alike. This pilot program involving 25 CrossRef publishers and societies (including the American Physical Society, Association for Computing Machinery, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford University Press, University of California Press, and John Wiley & Sons) lets pilot users search from CrossRef Search Pilot boxes on participating publishers' web sites. Results are from Google using Google's usual primo search and ranking algorithms. But get this: Google has indexed the full text of the articles on participating publishers' web sites, so results are filtered to the content from those publishers' sites. The pilot's goal is "to determine the value to the scholarly community of a free, federated, full-text, interdisciplinary, interpublisher search focused on the peer-reviewed scholarly literature" (for more details, see www.crossref.org/crossrefsearch.html). Let's hope it expands and becomes a reality.

Alexander Street Press
www.alexanderst.com/products/lali.htm

Latino Literature contains about 200 novels, several hundred short stories, 20,000 pages of poetry, and 190 plays. When completed, the file will include 100,000 pages of fiction and poetry and 450 plays: considerable growth is expected in the coming year. The major groups represented are Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, along with Argentines, Salvadorans, Dominicans, and other Central and South Americans.

The collection covers early 19th-century Chicano writers, writers from the Chicano Renaissance, and present-day authors. The works of teatros of the 1960s and 1970s are well represented, including El Teatro Campesino and El Teatro de la Esperanza. Authors include Rudolfo Anaya, Cherrie Moraga, Carlos Morton, Alurista, Virgil Suarez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Ivan Acosta, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Rolando Hinojosa, Tato Laviera, Lucha Corpi, and Luis Valdez. Materials are presented in their original languages, which means that 75 percent of the content is in English and the rest is in Spanish.

Much of the material comes from the personal archives of scholars and the writers themselves. Nearly 30 percent of the collection is rare or previously unpublished material, including plays.

How Does It Work? You can get at the information here in several ways. Browse the Table of Contents (by Authors, All Works, Fiction, Poems, Resources [playbills, posters, etc.], Plays, Characters, Productions, Theaters, Companies, or Subjects), or do a Find search using specific criteria (which allows searching by author, year of birth/death, place of birth/death, literary period, gender, nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, occupation, level of education, or school attended). Or do an advanced Search, which lets you do sophisticated Boolean and proximity searching within texts and then limits your search using all the access points from a Find search as well as Literature Type, Editor, Awards, and more.

This is an extraordinarily easy resource to explore. If you want to find out if an author is included, the fastest way is to use the author TOC. It lists authors alphabetically, links to biographical information, and then lists, and links to, their included works. My Find search for "library" located Ivan Wallace Arguelles's "Words of the Buddha Spoken at Berkeley Outside the Anthropology Library" from his work Captive of the Vision of Paradise. The full text of the poem displayed, with links to author and bibliographic information, as well as a link to the next section (a poem) in the book. My advanced Search for "embarrassment" in the text located a book recommended by a friend, Sandra Castillo's "My Father Sings, To My Embarrassment." I had access to the entire book, including the Front Matter (Title page and credits, TOC), Body (with poems arranged by subsection), Back Matter (a picture of Castillo with biographical information), and Notes.

And on every page there's an easy-to-read and -use navigational menu at screen top that links to Home as well as all the different search sections (TOC, Find, Search, and Help).

Can You and Your Patrons Use It? This is highly usable for patrons (ranging from computerphobes to electronic wizards) and librarians alike. The combination of TOC browsing with the workmanlike Find and the possibilities offered by advanced Search will serve any and all searching tastes. The file is beautifully designed with humanistic information seeking proclivities in mind. But it also allows expert searchers to work their electronic magic, as well. So if you like to discover new writers and works serendipitously, you can, by browsing the Table of Contents. Or if you need to find Cuban American women poets born in Havana between 1950 and 1960, it is just as easy.

How Good is it? Right now it's a nine because it's a work in progress. With the planned additional content, this will be a ten+. This content is rich and vitally needed yet highly elusive. Alexander Street has focused on an area of scholarship long overdue for attention. ¡Felicitaciones!

What's the Cost? The one-time purchase price for the file lists at $50,000. Before you run screaming from the room, note that Alexander Street makes very large discounts (many thousands of dollars). Get in touch (tell Eileen Lawrence that Cheryl sent you). Subscriptions range from $750 to $3995 based on a library's materials budget and FTE. Both plans include updates and an archival copy of the data. Alexander Street wants this product to serve as many people as possible, in libraries both large and small.

The Bottom Line Right now Latino Literature is a small jewel of a file, but it promises to become a full treasure trove of difficult-to-find and unique material. If your library serves researchers in Latino literature, comparative literature scholars, social scientists, or creative writing students, then you should offer them access to this database. Highly recommended for public, academic, and special libraries.