The University of New Mexico Latin American & Iberian Institute was awarded an $800,000 grant from the US Department of Education Technological Innovation for Foreign Information Access program (TICFIA).
The four-year grant, “University of New Mexico Harvester for Building Knowledge Streams in the Americas,” starts in October 2005.
“The project builds a harvester for open archived information from Latin America and UNM collections to form interdisciplinary knowledge communities and address the digital divide between the US and Latin America,” said Cynthia Radding, director of the Latin American and Iberian Institute and co-principal investigator. The other co-PI is Johann Van Reenen, assistant dean of University Libraries.
The project archives and disseminates:
• UNM Latin American collections in social medicine/public health, in conjunction with the Universidad de Guadalajara,
• current news reports of LAII's LADB news service ( http://ladb.unm.edu/ ),
• historical collections covering social history and political independence from the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela,
• K-12 teaching materials on LAII's Resources for Teaching About the Americas
• (RetaNet) web site http://retanet.unm.edu/ ,
• Brazilian PhD theses working with the Universidade Estadual de Campinas,
• and pre-print working paper scholarship in an open archive protocol.
The project supports and trains content providers at UNM and Latin American sites to establish open archive repositories for scholarly access to their collections. The project is a collaboration among the principal outreach programs of LAII -- LADB, ISTEC and RetaNet -- the Latin America Social Medicine project at the UNM Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center, University Libraries, the Consortium of the Americas for Interdisciplinary Science and the Latin American partners.
“This is the first TICFIA grant to be awarded to the University of New Mexico and its success is thanks to the strong staff support of LAII, the UNM Office of Research Services, and all the institutions that participate in this exciting and innovative project, bringing together information technologies and cutting-edge Latin American content,” Radding said.
Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920
Posted by scarr at April 11, 2005 10:24 AM