The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Latin Americanist Research Resources Project is a cooperative initiative that seeks to improve access to the array of research resources published in Latin America. Its goals are to restructure access to collections and resources on a comprehensive scale and to improve electronic access and document delivery systems for Latin Americanist resources. Launched in 1994 as one of three pilot projects recommended in the final report of the Task Force on The Acquisition and Distribution of Foreign Language and Area Studies Materials of AAU's Research Libraries Project, its membership has more than doubled from the initial group of twenty institutions. The Participating Libraries are composed of forty-five ARL institutions and two non-ARL libraries: the Felipe Herrera Library of the Inter-American Development Bank and Florida International University. Under the provisions of a United States Department of Education Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) grant, seven Latin American Partner Institutions were invited to join the project.
The Latin Americanist Research Resources Project is funded by the participating institutions and by the support of other organizations. Participating institutions contribute an initial membership fee of $3,000 and provide institutional support to acquire and maintain the collections and services initiated by the project. A matching grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched many of the Project's initiatives. During the period 1999/2002, a $405,000 grant from the United States Department of Education under the Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) program supported the development of a Latin American partnerships program and the enhancement of the Project's database. The University of Texas at Austin General Libraries serves as the lead institution for the TICFIA grant.. The U.S. Department of Education awarded a second TICIFIA grant of $195,000 for 2002/2003 to LARRP to improve access to Latin American grey literature in the social sciences. The UCLA Library is the lead institution for this new, three-year project.
- LAPTOC (Latin American Periodicals Tables of Contents): A searchable Web database that provides access to the tables of contents of more than 800 journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences, published in Latin America.
- Presidential Messages: A Web database that contains digital images of presidential speeches from Mexico and Argentina from the early 19th century to the present.
- Distributed Resources: An agreement between participating North American libraries designed to strengthen the collective coverage of monographs and other resources produced in Latin America. Through the concerted reallocation of library collection budgets, enhanced coverage of "non-core" materials is provided in an inter-connected network of collections. The total reallocated funding is more than $170,000 per year. The participants also provide online bibliographic records as quickly as possible and make the majority of these materials available through interlibrary loan. The program is described in more depth in the article, "The Latin Americanist Research Resources Project: A New Direction for Monographic Cooperation?" by Dan C. Hazen.
- Latin Americanist Open Archives Portal: This project is to improve access to improve access to social sciences grey literature produced in Latin America by research institutes, non-governmental organizations, and peripheral agencies through an OAI harvesting protocol portal service.