Hi all,

In this installment of Marisol’s representative travel here is my report of my trip to CRL (Center of Research Libraries) to attend my first Executive Committee meeting of CRL-LARRP (Latin Americanist Research Resources Project)

LARRP, part of CRL’s Global Resources Program**, “is a consortium of research libraries that seeks to increase free and open access to information in support of learning and scholarship in Latin American Studies. It mobilizes collaborative activities among individuals and organizations on a global scale but focuses on relationships within the academic library community.”

As part of my new role as a Member-at-large, I attended LARRP business meeting at CRL’s headquarter in Chicago to discuss the new initiatives, new working groups and revise several proposals for funding to be submitted later this year to the membership for vote.

Last year the membership voted for new by-laws and the LARRP Exec Board put forward a new planning document to map out the new directions for the consortium, with a bigger emphasis to support Open Access (OA) Initiatives. So, the first part of the meeting was to official welcome the new chairs of these new (and old) working groups, and to discuss next steps for each groups. The new working groups are:

• The Collections and Analysis Working Group [charge is to] improves the scholarly experience through targeted activities to gather and analyze data, and to launch follow-on collaborative initiatives.
• The Digital Initiatives Working Group [charge is to] encourages the production of digital resources on Latin America
• The Resource Discovery Working Group [charge is to] facilitates the visibility of research resources for Latin America. This group liaises with content aggregators, discovery tool providers, and other information creators for the benefit of the Latin Americanist research community.

We also listened to a report from CRL about several projects in the making such as the digitization of “a portion of its [CRL] archives… [to] establish an open web repository representing ten nations in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa where the integrity and survival of these government documents is known to be threatened.” LARRP hopes to focus its efforts to add to this new initiative by increasing the presence of Latin American countries in this project.

The second part of the meeting was to review several funding proposals to make sure that these proposals support the main mission of LARRP to make Latin American materials freely accessible. The proposals ranged from traditional digitization and microfilm projects to a proof of concept pilot project for making OA ebooks available through a commercial vendor. Although not all proposals were approved for voting, the conversations about each proposal and how they support LARRP main mission was quite enlightening and I felt I learned a lot by being part of this conversation. I am also happy that I was able to contribute in the discussion about the OA eBooks pilot project thanks to our experience here at UConn with our own PDA pilots.

I feel honored to be part of LARRP in this new capacity and continue representing UConn Libraries in this very important organization.

**: The other Global resources projects are:

• AFRINUL: Cooperative African Newspapers Project
• CIFNAL: Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections
• DSAL: Digital South Asia Library
• GNARP: German-North American Resources Partnership
• HRADP: Human Rights Archives and Documentation Program
• ICON: International Coalition on Newspapers
• TRAIL: Technical Report Archive & Image Library)