The Latin American Open Archives Portal

Eudora Loh, University of California, Los Angeles,

and

Dr. Ning Lin, The University of Texas, Austin

Co-Directors, TICFIA Project on "Mining Hidden Gems: Building a Latin American Open Archives Portal for Scholars"

The following article was originally published in the Winter 2004-2005 issue of the Global Resources Network Newsletter. The article is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

For more than a decade, the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP) has mobilized to address scholarly concerns over the lack of access to Latin American research materials, specifically journal literature and presidential messages. Attempts to improve access to the publications of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have met with less success. In October 2002, the Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) program of the U.S. Department of Education provided an opportunity to explore a new approach. Under a three-year grant to the UCLA Library,¹ LARRP is collaborating with the Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC), at The University of Texas at Austin, to develop a Latin American Open Archives Portal (LAOAP) focusing on Latin American grey literature in the social sciences. The portal allows institutions in Latin America to disseminate their research to a larger audience on the Internet and provides scholars with a means to search more effectively for a wealth of research materials currently not widely available. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is the technological framework of the portal to support the interoperability and standards that facilitate increased scholarly communication.

Why the focus on grey literature? For the purpose of this project, grey literature is defined as the publications, research reports, working documents, and other materials not controlled by commercial publishers. As a body of research materials, grey literature tends to represent viewpoints and analyses outside the political and intellectual mainstream, often on emerging topics. The AAU Task Force on Acquisition and Distribution of Foreign Language and Area Studies Materials highlighted its significance by designating the collaborative acquisition of working papers and technical reports of research institutes in Latin America as a major objective.² While production of these reports has mushroomed, the task of identifying, acquiring, providing rapid access to, and preserving them remains a daunting challenge. Even with increasing Internet access, they often are hidden on fragile institutional Web sites for unpredictable lengths of time, or in the "Deep Web," generally beyond the search capabilities of commercial browsers and search engines.

LARRP's strategy to improve access to grey literature is to develop a model of collaboration working directly with key Latin American research institutions, non-governmental organizations, and peripheral agencies in Latin America who produce high quality social science research materials. These institutions serve as data providers and data repositories. LANIC will directly host digital files, as necessary, for Latin American institutions whose server capacity is limited. The project has tested and developed methodologies for scanning and digitizing content; for creating and converting metadata; and for exposing metadata for harvesting, all geared to the technological environment of the participating institutions. LANIC also offers technical assistance in metadata conversion and has developed a training component to build capacity for ongoing digitization projects in the region.

The initial Latin American partners have been selected for their prominence as social science research centers, for their regional presence, and for their excellent, highly-trained staff. The partners are:

• Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales-Chile (FLACSO-Chile), in Santiago, Chile. The FLACSO network in Latin America and the Caribbean was created as an initiative of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). FLACSO-Chile.s working documents and other research materials cover many highly relevant topics including U.S.-Latin American relations, global questions, gender studies, immigration, democratization, and international relations and strategic studies.
• Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) in Antigua, Guatemala. CIRMA is a highly-respected research center with a strong regional presence in Central America. Its research reports focus on Guatemalan national identity, interethnic relations, and other topics. Its rich historical archive contains more than 30,000 photographs on the region. CIRMA also has close relations with several institutes that conduct linguistic studies of the indigenous languages spoken in Guatemala.
• Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A highly-regarded small, private research university with the best social sciences research library in Argentina, it produces working documents on a range of topics including political science, international studies, economics, and business.

LAOAP at LANIC provides access to the digital content of the repositories and specialized searching services aimed at the Latin Americanist social sciences research community. The three-tiered architecture of LAOAP is designed to comply with the OAI-PMH. The OAI, which initially developed a following in the e-print archives community, has taken a lead role in ensuring that digital data content providers use standardized metadata for electronic products to expose materials that otherwise would be hidden on the Web. OAI digital resources may also be "harvested" by other service providers that issue OAI-compliant "requests" as a means of collecting metadata from OAI repositories.

The first tier of LAOAP's architecture includes two types of content repositories: standard and static. A standard repository requires a "full-fledged" OAI-compliant Web server that needs backend application support for processing PMH requests. A static repository does not require any server-side modifications, and it contains XML files with metadata records and repository information, which significantly lowers the barrier to entry into OAI-PMH for our Latin American partners. Most of LAOAP.s grey literature is provided through static repositories, though we are open for harvesting any additional standard repositories in the field.

The second tier is the backend metadata harvesting services that consist of three main components: Java Harvester, Oracle database, and Static Repository Gateway (SRG). The Java Harvester³ gathers metadata either directly from standard repositories or indirectly from static repositories via our SRG. The LANIC SRG is a gateway between the Harvester and metadata XML files provided by the Latin American partners. The Oracle database receives and processes metadata records from our Harvester, and serves the searching functions via Java applications to the front end users. The backend programming work was completed and tested in 2004.

The third tier is the front end Web user interface (UI) that includes basic search, advanced search, and Web browsing features. Basic search provides keyword search of all the metadata stored in the database, and allows users to select different repositories. The advanced search offers several additional functions that enable users to define the metadata fields such as title, author, subject, abstract and language of the grey literature; to construct Boolean searching relationships among these fields; and to refine the results by limiting year of publication, sorting orders, and number of records per page. The Web browsing UI permits users to browse the metadata database as easily as if they were clicking though a series of systematically organized Web pages. Most of these metadata searching and browsing returns are linked to full-text documents. These interactive UI functions are supported by a series of reusable server-side Java applications, which are in the final stage of development.

Initial alpha release of the LAOAP user interface is scheduled for internal testing by the end of January 2005. Expanding the list of Latin American repository institutions and refining search features and metadata to meet the needs of the Latin Americanist social sciences research community are the next steps to realizing the full potential of the Latin American Open Archives Portal.

For additional information, visit the Latin American Open Archives Portal Web site and Bibliotecas Digitales Latinoamericanas en el Marco de OAI-PMH, by María Inés Bravo, Kent Norsworthy, Paula Pardo Lorca.

Endnotes

1. The UCLA Library serves as the lead institution in the 2002/2005 TICFIA grant on behalf of the 52 North American and 7 Latin American member institutions of LARRP.
2. Report of the AAU Task Force on Acquisition and Distribution of Foreign Language and Area Studies Materials, Washington DC, 1994. http://www.arl.org/aau/FATOC.html.
3. LARRP would like to acknowledge the contribution of the UCLA Digital Library Program, which provided the initial source code for the Harvester. UCLA had, in turn, modified University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign code to run on Oracle for its OAI Sheet Music project. The LAOAP Java Harvester was developed by integrating and rewriting the source code.