UAlbany Faculty, Students Build Online Repository for Latin American, Caribbean, Latinx, and Iberian Studies
By Bethany Bump
ALBANY, N.Y. (July 30, 2024) — UAlbany faculty and students played a key role in an award-winning international project to create a repository of free online resources for Latin American, Caribbean, Latinx, and Iberian studies.
The online repository known as LACLI was developed by the Latin America North East Libraries Network (LANE), a network of library professionals representing academic and research libraries mainly in the Northeastern U.S., with leadership from Jesús Alonso-Regalado, subject librarian for the University Libraries at UAlbany and principal investigator/coordinator on the project.
Students worldwide have collaborated on the project, including graduate and undergraduate students from UAlbany’s Spanish program, history and Africana, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies departments.
“We started this project during COVID because there was increased demand for online resources and a need for materials, especially primary sources, related to Latin American, Caribbean, Latinx and Iberian studies to support teaching, learning and research,” said Alonso-Regalado.
LACLI provides resources for students, faculty, librarians and digital scholars looking for primary sources and other materials from these regions of the globe, including audiovisuals, books, data, ephemera, oral histories, periodicals, reference works, web archives and more. Materials are available in Spanish, Portuguese and English, and categorized by subject, country, language, time period and more.
Galilea Estrella, who was born in the Dominican Republic and graduated from UAlbany’s History program last spring, said she was recruited to assist with the project while an undergraduate because she is bilingual in Spanish and English and interested in history.
She was tasked with analyzing sources for the site and identifying key terms that could help users search for specific topics. Many of the sources she analyzed concerned human rights and covered topics such as the Guatemalan Civil War, Brazilian Civil War and Chilean dictatorship.
“The more I learned about the (LACLI) program, the more it interested me because I got to learn all these things about Latin America that I never knew about,” said Estrella, who moved to the U.S. when she was 7. “When you're in America, you see more of the Western perspective, the American perspective, but with these sources, you get a new perspective. There may be perspectives you don't agree with, or that you do agree with, and that's the magic of LACLI — you get all these new perspectives from this big area.”
Thomas Ryan, who is in the graduate program in public history at UAlbany, became involved in the LACLI project while studying history and Spanish as an undergraduate at UAlbany.
His job was to find, upload and tag sources in the LACLI database, and translate materials from different Spanish dialects across Latin America and Spain — a skill he attributes to dialectology classes he took as part of his Spanish program.
Ryan hopes to one day work in a public history setting as a historian on Latin American topics, and said the project seemed like a good way to combine his lifelong interest in the Spanish language with his passion for archival science.
“The hands-on experience that I got from the project was really helpful in terms of understanding how databases are created and how they function,” he said. “Through this understanding I’m able to navigate databases a lot easier now, which is a big benefit to someone who wants to work in archives.”
Other UAlbany students involved in the project included Emily Ordonez, an undergraduate in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures' Spanish program, and Gina Andrade, a PhD student in the Africana, Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies department.
Student research on the LACLI project was funded by the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALAM) Award for Institutional Collaborative Initiatives and UAlbany’s History department.
The project has won several awards since its debut in 2020, including a Digital Humanities Award for best dataset and a 2024 Archives, Libraries and Digital Scholarship Section Award for best public project from the Latin American Studies Association, the largest professional association in the world for individuals and institutions engaged in the study of Latin America.
As of July 29, the LACLI site featured more than 1,198 resources. Work to expand resources available through the site is ongoing as new collaborators are recruited to contribute.