Not long ago scholars wanting to conduct in depth research about indigenous cultures in Latin America, for example, would have to travel to the region and visit different libraries and repositories. Maybe the researcher would be lucky enough to find needed documents, photos, books and resources critical to his research. But maybe the materials couldn’t be located, were unavailable or the library was closed. The days of time-consuming, expensive research in Latin American topics may soon be over, thanks to the Latin America Knowledge Harvester and Portal (LAKH).
Photo: Johann van Reenen (l.), assistant dean, University Libraries, and Cynthia Radding, director, Latin American and Iberian Institute.
The Harvester for Creating Knowledge Streams in the Americas Project, coordinated by UNM’s Latin American and Iberian Institute, addresses the challenge of identifying and maintaining stable and reliable Internet access to library and institutional collections and digitized archives in and about Latin America.
LAKH, a road map on the Information Superhighway that leads users to content information from Latin American multidisciplinary collections, is funded by a grant from the US Department of Education Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) and the University of New Mexico.
Project Partners
The project goal is to stimulate new scholarship in and about Latin America through the use of the portal and the formation of cross-disciplinary and multilingual knowledge communities. LAKH is a collaboration between UNM and pilot Latin American partners: the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico, Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela and the Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia. The two universities and the Brazilian institute were selected from institutions with long-standing relations with UNM and university-wide bilateral agreements for faculty and student exchanges and collaboration.
Cynthia Radding, director, Latin American and Iberian Institute, and Johann van Reenen, assistant dean, University Libraries, are co-PIs on the grant.
The idea for the harvester came from the Open Archives Initiative established in Santa Fe in 1999, van Reenen said. The international standard allows organizations with unique data sets – such as archives, video and visual collections to create a repository based on OAI standards.
Speaking the Language
“The intent of the grant is to find new avenues of access to foreign information, preferably in translation and in a digital format,” van Reenen said. He added that the biggest challenge of the pilot project is creating a trilingual search engine and organizing the streams of information in the portal.
The project team is comprised of nine UNM faculty, graduate students, and staff from main campus and the HSC; they represent different nationalities and languages and work closely together to complete the project’s goals and solve problems as they arise. In addition, the team hired a librarian who is a Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking meta-data specialist to look at categorizing the information infrastructure.
“The complexity lies in that we have different types of information for a variety of organizations and three languages over which we want a query system,” he said.
He said that LAKH allows for “harvesting” data from any intellectual asset that meets the standard anywhere in the world. By harvesting meta-data, information can be drawn from seemingly unalike repositories. “It will create easy interdisciplinary research. Essentially, it will allow users to mine information from sources not even thought about before,” he said.
LAKH resides at UNM as part of the institutional repository. “This enriches national access generally, but particularly for UNM researchers,” van Reenen said.
“LAKH will harvest collections so that the searches can be performed in Latin American topics that will point to pertinent objects within various collections across the three languages,” he said.
Dspace, the free frontier
The biggest benefit for the Latin American partners is that we are providing them with a free software option, DSpace that is easy to set up and run, van Reenen said.
The DSpace digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material. Research institutions worldwide use DSpace as an institutional repository for records management, and more. The DSpace open source platform is freely available so users can customize and extend it to suit their specific needs.
“We think that UNM was awarded this four-year Title VI grant because of the university’s long-standing record of scholarship and service in Latin America and the strength of our interdisciplinary programs in Latin American Studies and related professional degrees, combined with UNM’s leadership the open archives movement and information technology,” Radding commented.
Radding said that UNM is one of ten TICFIA centers, and that UNM will host the national TICFIA conference with invited speakers and panelists April 19-20, 2007.
Radding affirmed that LAKH is both a tool for the present and an avenue to the future, leading to innovative uses of technology to stimulate research and democratize international access to knowledge.
Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu