Author Archives: Marisol Ramos

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About Marisol Ramos

For those curious to know my background, I have a B. A. in Anthropology from Univ. of Puerto Rico, a Master degree in Latin America and Caribbean Studies from SUNY-Albany and a M.L.I.S with an archival concentration from UCLA.

Operational Trip: Book buying trip at Feria Internacional de Libros (FIL)/International Book Fair at Guadalajara, Mexico

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From November 29th to December 4th, I had the opportunity to attend FIL in Guadalajara, Mexico, the biggest book fair in the Americas and the second biggest in the world (the biggest is in Germany, the Frankfurt International Book Fair). I was able to attend partly thanks to ALA-FIL travel grant, which paid for hotel, book fair registration and breakfast, and our library which support me by paying for airfare.

ALA has for many years partnered with the Mexican government and the FIL coordinators to bring American librarians, both from the public and academic sector, to the fair as a way to improve the quality of American libraries by being able to buy directly, not only from Mexican publishers, but also from publishers from all over Latin America, the Caribbean and even Europe and Asia.

It has been almost two years since my last visit to the FIL so I have a lot to catch up in the buying department. Because I arrived during the weekend I was able to get an early start. First thing I did was to visit the stands of several Central American countries. Central American countries (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc.) had small print runs so if you don’t get their books early they may run out before you have visited their stand! My diligence paid off and I was able to acquire several interesting books from novels to social sciences studies about immigration, politics, economy and gender and human rights issues. Other country that I visited early was Peru which had several books I wanted. Unfortunately, I couldn’t buy all of them in my first day since some of them were not ready for sale. One of the major activities at the book fair was to present new books—there were 590 of such presentations—with a formal ceremony and a discussion leaded by experts of the field who discussed the value of the book to the public. After the ceremony, you can buy the book—which I did!

Because the fair is so huge—the convention center is the size of a football stadium— and there were so many stands—1,945 publishers attended the fair— I decided to plan my week based on the countries I wanted to visit and not to spend all my budget in one day. During my visit I bought books from Cuba, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Chile and Peru on such subjects as immigration, gender studies, social justice, human rights, social movements, labor and literature. In addition, I asked my Mexican distributor to make a selection of Mexican books sold only in the FIL—since Mexico by itself take over half of the convention center!

I think this strategy helped me focused on the countries we don’t purchase many books because of cost and/or availability, while my distributor used a purchasing profile for Mexico that I gave him so he could acquire the type of materials my users need. This profile is based on the feedback I received from my constituents about their research and teaching needs in Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Sciences, Human Rights and Spanish. I have profiles for each country that we have consistently acquired materials through the years, and I have added new countries as new faculty and research interests had shifted since I started working in 2007. Using these profiles, I made purchases decisions trying my best to balance between “just in case” and “just in time” philosophies while at the book fair.

Just to give you an idea of the size and the amount of people that attend this book fair, here are some figures from the FIL website for this 2014 book fair.

  • Attending Public: 767,200
  • Book Professionals (librarians, dealers): 20,393
  • Publishing houses: 1,945
  • Countries represented by publishing houses: 44

What are the benefits of attending a book fair?

  • Talking directly with the different publishers from each of these countries help me identify emerging areas of interest that may have not reached the US academia yet, e.g. promising new authors that have won national or regional awards, new mixed media and literature genres such as encoded images in fantasy fiction. For example, I found a novel, Fuego Lento by Costa Rican writer Jessica Clark, which incorporated a code inside the illustrations used in the book cover and each chapter divider. When using the right apps in your smartphone, you can see 3-D images on the phone screen–like an animation jumping out of the page–which enhances the reading experience of this tale of apocalyptic proportions set in San Jose, Costa Rica.
  • Being able to buy books for a fraction of what it would cost us to obtain them through a distributor. For example, I have the pleasure to meet Agustina Ponce, the director of Ediciones Vigía, one of the most famous homemade/artists’ book publisher in Cuba. Usually these books are hard to find in the US, and when you get them, you paid between a 300-400% mark-up. This time around, since I met directly with the publisher, I was able to pay the actual cost of these books and saved us quite a bit of money.
  • Meeting fellow librarians from the US and Mexico and exchange news and ideas about how to best approach buying books in the fair.
  • Learning about new trends such as the ebooks market is another plus of attending the fair–mainly the emphasis is in popular fiction but there is some interest to expand into the academic sphere.
  • Finally, there is nothing more satisfying to be in a book fair and walk among thousands of books and seeing young and old, buying and reading books! Paradise on Earth!

Final observations: Even though this was a well-attended book fair and the usual amount of countries were presented, there were less books sold at the fair compared with past years. I asked some of the vendors why they had fewer books in their stands this time around and many replied that because an increase in shipping cost they brought half of the amount of what they usually bring. So, it was a good thing that I attended early to be able to acquire as many books I could since otherwise I could have missed out on many great titles.

I should be getting all the books from the book fair by the end of this month and I plan to create lists in WorldCat of what I acquired at the fair to share with my faculty. I hope to do a “Show and Tell” later to showcase some of the books that I acquired with my faculty. Finally, I am working with Prof. Odette Casamayor to do a small exhibition using books from Ediciones Vigía to showcase the books I acquired during this trip and others that we already have at the archives.

I can go on talking about the book fair but I will stop here. Please enjoy the photos I took during my visit and if you have questions about my trip feel free to contact me anytime.

LANE (Latin American Northeast) Library Consortium Fall meeting

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Poster of exhibit at El Barrio Museum, Manhattan. Posters reads: Marisol pops New York!

Picture taken at El Barrio Museum in Manhattan (not taken during the LANE meeting but after Christmas. I just thought it looks good with the post)

As the UConn representative to LANE, twice during the academic year, I attend the LANE meetings, where we meet to discuss issues, concerns and share information regarding the acquisition of Latin American, Caribbean and Spanish (Spain) materials for our libraries. We meet each autumn for a whole day meeting, usually in NYC, and at the SALALM Annual meeting when we meet for a smaller meeting.

This last fall, we met at the Bobst Library at New York University. We have a very busy schedule and several guest speakers. The highlight of the meeting was the discussion on ebooks and streaming options for Spanish materials and a demo of new streaming product, Digitalia Film Library.

At this point, options are still limited and business models are still in flux in the Spanish language world (and the same can be said about other foreign languages options for ebooks and streaming films). After our discussion, we realized that although it is a good sign that there are several players entering the Spanish language ebooks market (e.g. Digitalia in Spain, Casalini in Italy(1), and Ventara in Argentina) and one new player in the streaming film market (Digitalia), the whole marketplace is still in its early infancy and there are issues that need to be improved. For example, for ebooks, we are still seeing DRM ebooks; clunky interfaces, and streaming is still an emerging business. Although there is a good amount of Spanish (Spain) publishers represented in ebooks format, Latin American and Caribbean publishers are less represented and therefore the ebooks inventory is very limited—especially for academic-level books. The only vendors selling academic books from Latin American and the Caribbean to libraries are Ventara from Argentina, and Digitalia from Spain, who had made contracts with several academic presses in Latin America and the Caribbean (Chile, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico). Mexico does have an ebooks market but they are focusing more in popular titles than in academic ones. So far, Mexico doesn’t have a vendor(s) approaching US academic libraries to sell ebooks yet but it is a matter of times to see such a player enter the marketplace.

In the streaming film area, Digitalia is the only Spanish company offering streaming for libraries. The selection of films in this new product is decent and it’s still growing. One issue that we discussed was the fact that the films in this product do not have subtitles, which is an issue for most of us since students learning Spanish don’t necessarily have the skills to follow the dialogue of movies without subtitles.

Even though things are not perfect yet, it was noted by several librarians in the group that these vendors welcome feedback from LANE and SALALM librarians, and are open to explore new business models, and improve their products to appeal to the US academic libraries’ market. One of the outcomes of our discussion was identifying these issues to be able to contact vendors and share our concerns with them to see if they will address them in the near future. We believe that if many of us share the same concerns with them, the possibility for these vendors to improve their products to make them more appealing to us will increase.

There were two guest’s presentations during the meeting. One by the librarians at the United Nations’ Dag Hammarskjold Library, in New York, who talked about the many free resources online available at their website (from statistics to reports from each of the many departments that comprised the United Nations), and a second presentation by the Library director and the bibliographer of the Museum of Modern Art Library, who talked about their amazing Latin American art collection available to researchers at both their NYC locations (Manhattan and Queens), at their website and at the Arcade, “the catalog of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)”. One of the choices to search is “Latin American collections” which allow researches to search MoMA’s Latin American art collection.

All in all, a great day conference!

Next posting, Guadalajara’s International Book Fair!

Notes:

(1) Casilini’s Torrossa ebooks platform not only offer ebooks in Spanish but also in Italian, French and Portuguese.

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Advisory Board Meeting and Conference

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Last October I attended the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Advisory Board Meeting and Biennial Conference: Prensa, Latinidad y Legado: Spanish-Language Press and Print Culture in Syracuse, NY.

The Recovery Project is “a national program based at the University of Houston that locates, identifies, preserves and disseminates the literary contributions of U.S. Hispanics from colonial times to 1960*”. This project was established in the 1990s by Nicholas Kanellos, “Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Studies and director of both Arte Público Press and the Recovery Project.*” The people involves with the Recovery Project feel very strongly about making sure that the documentary evidence of Hispanics in the United States don’t get lost or destroy because of lack of institutional or financial support at the state and federal level. This project was started in the 1990s because many Hispanics felt at the time that there were few ethnic archives supported by archival institutions (either private or state institutions), especially those interested in acquiring and preserving materials that documented the long history of the presence of Hispanic in the what it is known today as the United States. At the time, private funding was plentiful and they were able not only to create the first newspapers’ union catalog that track Hispanic newspapers from the XIXth century to the 1960s but later on to find, acquire and microfilmed many of these newspapers to make them accessible to researchers. Through a partnership with Readex* this collection was digitized and made available online as a product from which the Recovery Project gets royalties that they then reinvest to continue acquiring, cataloging and preserving these materials. After the success with Hispanic newspapers, they extended the project to include archival collections such as personal papers of distinguish Hispanic American involved in the civil rights movement. These collections of rare newspapers and archival collections that they acquired are now available at the University of Houston Hispanic Collection archives.

After 9/11 in 2001, funding for this kind of project has diminished and the Recover Project decided to partner with EBSCO to digitize and make available these new materials (pamphlets, books, newspapers, images, manuscripts, etc.) through a new product, The Latino-Hispanic American Experience: The Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection** (Part 1 and 2) as a way to generate royalties that again are reinvested into the project to continue their works.

Every two years, as members of the Advisory Board, we meet to discuss Recovery current projects and new projects and this year the main discussion was to decide new directions for the Recovery project, in specific, to extend the time period for acquisition of materials from 1960 to 1990. Although we didn’t achieve a final consensus about the extension, there were many good discussions on why it is important to find sustainable ways to acquire, preserve and give access to materials that document the cultural heritage of Hispanic people in the United States after the 1960s especially considering the arrival of the Internet and the Web, electronic media and social media networks.

After the Advisory Board meeting, as board members we support the biennial conference as moderators of panels. I had the pleasure to moderate the panel: “Pedagogy, Research and Archives”. The panelists, Dr. Enrique Mallén, director and general editor of the On-line Picasso Project, https://picasso.shsu.edu/, Caryl Ward, subject librarian for Latin American Studies at Binghamton University, and Lisa Cruces, archivist of the newly created Hispanic Collections at University of Houston, talked about how to incorporate freely accessible digital collections, and archival collections into the teaching and research of Hispanic American print and media culture. A variety of challenges were discussed such as insufficient financial support and/or staffing, changing technologies, and quality of scanning, but all panelists agreed that it is worth the effort to make primary sources available freely to complement what is behind pay walls. They also emphasized the important to establish collaborations between librarians, archivists and faculty to make sure that their classes benefit from materials both found online and offline (in the archives).

Another panel that I attended of great interests to librarians and faculty alike was the presentation done by the library staff at Syracuse University which regaled us with three great presentations of the many hidden treasures that document Hispanic literary culture in the United States. For example, Brett Michael Barrie, Rare Book Cataloger and Lucy Mulroney, Interim Director of Special Collections shared their experience of processing donations that document the relationship between a NYC independent press (Grove Press) and many Latin American writers such as Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo and Pablo Neruda (and the correspondence between editors, translators and writers) about the translation of these writers works into English; and a Spanish professor’s book collection that documented  relationships between major writers from Latin America and Spain during the 20th century.

There were many other panels during the conference that I couldn’t attend but some of the ones I attended were for example one on the research documenting the presence of Dominican(s) in New York City, one example was the case of Juan Rodriguez, who was in New Amsterdam (today New York City) in 1613– while another focused on the strong presence of Cubans in New York city prior of 1898, especially the presence of Cuban Independence champion, José Martí. Other panels focused on the struggles of Mexican American in the United States after the Mexican-American War as documented in newspapers and personal correspondence. Much of the research done and discussed in this conference came from materials found by the Recovery project and available through Readex or EBSCO.

As a final note to this post, EBSCO did a presentation about Series II of the Arte Público collection and acknowledged that because missteps from their parts it hasn’t sold as well as series I. Part of the reason is that many libraries are unable or unwilling to pay the price set by them since it is too high and it used the whole FTE of an university regardless if only a fraction of the registered students would ever used this resource. Therefore EBSCO is considering for their pricing scheme to use instead something called relative FTE that account better the actual potential usage based on the departments and their student body size, instead of all the students at a particular university. So there is hope not only with this Arte Publico product but other primary sources products to be priced on a more reasonable way so more university can acquire it for their faculty and students.

Overall, this was a very worthy conference to attend and I am happy to be part of the advisory board of this commendable project. In 2016 is the 25th anniversary of the project which I hope to attend.

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A visit to CRL-LARRP: Representative Trip

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CRLlogoHi 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)

Cultural heritage and Diversity: Report on what I did at SAA this past August 2014

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This year I didn’t attend the Society of American Archivists (SAA) annual meeting per se, but I attended several meetings and events as part of my official duties as a committee member, as part of what we called the official business side of annual meetings.

I have been a member of SAA for many years (since 1999) and the past 4 years I have been a member of the Cultural Heritage Working Group (CHWG), who charge is:

[to] take the lead in fostering discussion, clarifying issues, and investigating a range of alternative approaches to managing, preserving, and providing access to cultural heritage, given the rights and responsibilities of cultural groups and stakeholders and archivists’ interest in providing equal and open access to all.

In the last 4 years I had the opportunity to be the co-chair of the group (2011-2012) and the online communication point person (2013-2014). This year was my last year as a member so I attended the working group business meeting to finalize tasks given to me last year which included creating an online presence in Facebook and Twitter and to provide a case study based on my experience with the Puerto Rican Civil Court Documents collection that we were able to digitize with the support of CRL-LAMP and the great staff of the digital project team, specifically Michael Bennett. During this year meeting, the new chair, Jennifer O’Neil, focused the discussion on the next steps for the group: gathering case studies that showcase good strategies to better serve cultural heritage collections (e.g. how to balance access to materials with restrictions requested by the creators of these cultural heritage collections); developing best practices and establishing collaboration with other groups such as the education/curriculum committee to further the knowledge of cultural heritage archives issues among the membership.

In addition of attending CHWG meeting, I was invited to speak on a panel sponsored by ARL-SAA Mosaic Scholarship program. This is a new program that got funded thanks to a “$487,652 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program.” There mission is to:

The ARL/Society of American Archivists (SAA) Mosaic Program promotes much-needed diversification of the archives and special collections professional workforce by providing financial support, practical work experience, mentoring, career placement assistance, and leadership development to emerging professionals from traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups. An important objective of the program is to attract and retain individuals who demonstrate excellent potential for scholastic and personal achievement and who manifest a commitment both to the archives and special collections profession and to advancing diversity concerns within it.

I was asked to share my experience as a minority archivist/librarian in SAA and provide my advice on what to do to get their voices heard and foster change in the organization. This was a great experience since the panel was populated with a cross-section of the most inspiring people who shared their life experience in the organization to these graduate studies pursuing careers in archives, special collections or related fields.

Honduras Archivists

A wonderful lunch with LACCHA members and three presenters from Honduras: Nilda Lizeth López Fernandez (far right), Dilcia Mayela Valle (middle right), and Alexander Flores (far left). In addition, in attendance, Theresa Polk (near left), Marisol Ramos, Beatrice Colastin Skokan (standing-right); Natalie Bauer (taking the picture)

Finally, I attended a lunch sponsored by LACCHA (Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Archives) roundtable to meet and exchange ideas with several archivists from Honduras that presented later that week at the LACCHA roundtable meeting. This was an event that I helped coordinate but this year the roundtable meeting was changed from Wednesday to Friday so I couldn’t attend their meeting (the first time ever since I helped established this group in 2008). I was grateful for having this great opportunity to meet face to face and exchanged ideas with our colleagues from Honduras and learned the similarities between their work and ours.

Although this year I didn’t stay for the annual conference, as you can read there is a lot of work done even before an annual conference started. Most of the work done by committee, working groups and roundtables happen prior to the opening ceremony and I am happy that this year I was able to attend very productive meetings and events!