LARRP Digital Initiatives

LARRP recently approved projects to receive funding, and the work is still ongoing for these projects:

  • Baja California Human Rights Commission Archive
  • Carteles  
  • Digitizing Peru’s Print Revolution
  • Fondo Real de Cholula 

Recently completed projects funded by LARRP include:

  • A project to digitize the Conde de Montemar letters was undertaken with LARRP support at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The letters from the family of Don Diego José Carrillo de Albornoz (1724-1789), V Conde de Montemar, date from 1761 to 1799. This family, descendants of Spanish Conquistadors, was one of the most powerful in the Viceroyalty of Peru and in Spanish nobility. During this time period, the Carrillo de Albornoz siblings held more titles than any other family in Peru. 
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  • Funding from LARRP supported the analog to digital conversion of 160 reel-to-reel audio tapes selected from the Louis J. Boeri and Minín Bujones Collection of Cuban-American Radionovelas housed at the Latin American Library at Tulane University. These recordings of radio programs were produced and broadcast by America’s Production Inc. from Miami during the 1960s. They constitute a unique research resource that was trapped on aging, unstable audio tapes and was inaccessible due to a lack of functioning playback equipment. 
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  • LARRP provided funding for a three-year project in partnership between the University of New Mexico (UNM) and the Fideicomiso Archivo Plutarco Elias Calles and Fernando Torreblanca (FAPECFT) in Mexico City. The partnership has produced a bilingual digitization and open access and discovery project that makes physical documents held at the FAPECFT available in a publicly accessible platform hosted by UNM, where documents can be searched in Spanish and English.
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  • The digitization of the University of Miami’s collection of oversized volumes of the nineteenth century Cuban periodical La Gaceta de la Habana was funded partially by LARRP. As the newspaper of record for the last half century of the colonial government, the social, cultural, legislative, and commercial information printed on the pages of la Gaceta de la Habana is of interest to a wide variety of scholars. 
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  • Financial support from LARRP enabled the digitization of a portion of the Genaro García Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Materials in the Genaro García Collection relate primarily to the history of Mexico from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries, and concern Mexico's politics, culture, linguistics, religion, literature, and archeology. The oversize portion of the collection, the bulk of which is from the colonial era, contains manuscripts, broadsides, photographs, lithographs, and ephemera, acquired by García during his career as a historian and collector of Mexican materials. 
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  • LARRP has funded the digitization of several newspaper titles that are now openly accessible through the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC).  These newspapers include: 
  • Funding from LARRP supported the digitization of extensive hidden collections of ephemeral materials from Latin American that are now accessible through Princeton University’s Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera. With LARRP’s support, Princeton had more than 10,000 pieces of ephemera (over 58,000 page images) digitized and openly accessible to researchers. 
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  • A project to create Digital Collections for Latin American and U.S. Latino Spanish Language Research at the University of Southern California received LARRP funding support. The first phase of this project digitized 156 hours of recordings of Spanish speakers from audiocassettes. This part of the collection includes recordings made in Southern California in 1976 and 1978, and in Santiago, Chile in 1978-1992. The second phase of the project created orthographic transcriptions for the corpora digitized in the first phase. 
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  • LARRP funded a pilot project at Vanderbilt University to preserve and digitize 426 audiocassettes of the Manuel Zapata Olivella Collection.  The majority of the tapes selected were Colombian ethnographic interviews, with a focus on Afro-Colombians and indigenous groups. The interviews were conducted in the 1970s and covered a wide range of topics, from foodways to slave ancestry. 
    Link to collection

  • LARRP initiated a partnership with CLACSO (Latin American Council on Social Sciences), JSTOR, and Libreria Garcia Cambeiro to make a portion of CLACSO's monographs freely available online through the JSTOR platform. This model has the potential to greatly expand access to knowledge produced in the Global South and make that information available to users around the world. The lack of widespread commercial access to Latin American monographs on academic ebook platforms prompted LARRP members to identify a creative way to support Latin American scholarly monographic publishing. This initiative's pilot program has introduced a sustainable, library-supported Open Access model for Latin American monographs and contains two hundred monographs. For more information, please see: Open Access Monographs Project | Center for Research Libraries