http://laii.unm.edu/
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001 USA
Phone: (505) 277-2961
Co-Principal Investigator:
Dr. Cynthia Radding
cradding@unm.edu
Co-Principal Investigator:
Johann van Reenen
jreenen@unm.edu
Amount Awarded Year 1: $192,000
Project Overview:
The University of New Mexico (UNM) Harvester for Creating Knowledge Streams in the Americas addresses the digital divide that currently marks a scientific barrier between North and South America by forming a knowledge community supported by multidisciplinary Latin America content based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol. The Latin American subcontinent is critical for the themes and technology methods addressed in this proposal.
The Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII) at the University of New Mexico will form a wide-reaching Open Archives community of Latin America content comprised of acclaimed Latin America content providers at UNM (University Libraries, Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium, Latin American Social Medicine project, Latin America Data Base news service, Resources for Teaching About the Americas, Consortium of the Americas for Interdisciplinary Sciences and partner institutions in Latin America), to provide new information about Latin America for the scholarly community and public educators. The partners selected for this TICFIA project and the content fields identified for the knowledge communities it comprises focus on key areas of scientific research and cultural production that originate in Latin America and resonate with current scholarship and social needs in the United States.
The project exploits Open Archives information management objectives to stimulate new Latin America scholarship and content through its use and the formation of cross-disciplinary knowledge communities. It addresses the challenge of making operational a flexible harvester of Open Archives community content, with search, retrieval, and disseminating capabilities that make accessible rare and previously under utilized print-only collections and works in progress. The UNM Harvester creates reciprocal paths for foreign information access between US and Latin American institutions and creates a vehicle for sharing scientific research across an international community of scholars, teachers, and learners.
The University of New Mexico and its Latin American institutional partners will collect and disseminate Latin American and Iberian multidisciplinary content with a customized interface built on Open Archives protocol, that will harvest streams of Latin America full-text content from the Open Archives community of repositories that participate in the project. Streams of content will be harvested, indexed, and made available to users in the following areas: history (colonial and early national development; recent and current news); public health; photographs and images; curriculum resources for teaching about the region; indigenous culture; and new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences including works in progress and data sets. The project supports and trains content providers to establish OAI repositories for open access to their collections.
The project's OAI harvester software will be set to harvest the collections in this project and additional Latin American collections in OAI repositories in the future. Sample user groups will be surveyed to determine what they need to make OAI content attractive and easy to search, retrieve, and use. Results will determine the kinds of services the customized harvester must provide. The UNM harvester software will gather indexed materials and abstracts and directs users to full- text repositories of previously unavailable content from collaborating institutions in Latin America in three major languages: English, Spanish and Portuguese. Content will comply with the Dublin Standard for metadata used for OAI repositories and harvesting.
The harvester will feature an adaptive approach to cataloguing items and displaying content. Content producers will be encouraged to describe their posted items in their own words; then, the library information specialist will add to the author's keywords standard subject terms, in conformity with Library Subject analysis. This approach captures the specialized and evolving language of practitioners of diverse disciplines, allowing a scholar to search for an item using familiar terms that are used in his/her field, and not be constrained by library cataloging terms, while also providing standard subject/keywords for references and searches.
Once the harvester is developed, the project intends to experiment with a preprint OAI service for the UNM and Latin American participants. The addition of rapid dissemination of new information, discussions, notes, and comments on these new preprints will form a rich substrate for building collaborative communities. The project team will investigate the viability of UC Berkeley's E-print service for implementing this project objective to establish a pre-print, electronic publishing OAI community.
Project partners are building OAI institutional repositories for harvesting the following content:
I. Latin American Social Medicine (LASM) Journals: LASM at UNM and its institutional partner in the University of Guadalajara will abstract 50 seminal articles per year from nine Latin American public health journals. Social medicine subjects covered in LASM's abstracted Latin American journals pertain to many areas of inquiry, including: health and social movements, environment, economics, labor, violence, and social disparities arising from class, race, ethnicity, and gender. They will also translate the abstracts into English and Portuguese and post the structured abstracts and general OAI metadata records for the abstracts to the UNM IR in a designated community. The OAI records of these abstracts, which point to the full- text journal sources, will be disseminated through the UNM harvester and made available through UNM Health Sciences Library and Information Center's inter library loan. Latin American journals selected for this project are: Argentina: Salud Colectiva; Brazil: Saúde em Debate, Cadernos de Saúde Pública. Interface, Saúde e Sociedade, Ciência e Saúde Coletiva, Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia; Colombia: Revista de la Facultad Nacional de Salud Pública, Revista de Salud Pública.
II. UNM/LAII's Latin America Data Base on-line news service: The Latin America Data Base (LADB) produces three weekly news bulletins about Latin America. To obtain sufficient source material, LADB has developed a customized Web crawler, Recluse, that collects news from Latin American periodicals and wire services, downloads them by date in a format that is full-text searchable. LADB professional writers produce summary analyses of the news in English; each article lists the source materials and dates used for the story to ensure accuracy and assist readers who want to follow up on the story. The Latin American dailies currently collected by Recluse cannot be shared in an OAI repository because of copyright constraints, but for this project LADB has resolved this limitation. Digested news articles (in English) will be converted to an OAI database and abstracted so that the content of the archive and articles published henceforth will be searchable for non-subscribers, pointing to full-text, and listing the source materials and dates used for each article. In the proposed project 46 issues per year of LADB's three bulletins will be abstracted, upon weekly publication, for OAI harvesting, with a link from the abstract to LADB's Web site offering access to the full text of each article.
III. History - Instituto Bolivarium, Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB), Venezuela: UNM through ISTEC will provide technical assistance to the Instituto Bolivarium to establish its own OAI institutional repository and to metatag for harvesting the O'Leary Collection of documents compiled by Simón Bolívar's personal secretary. The collection contains 54 volumes with over 17,000 folios. A related project will harvest the database of the municipal history of Valencia, Venezuela, from 1636-1946, a collection that covers the independence period. USB's Instituto Bolivarium is participating in the TICFIA project with the long-term objective to digitize and post their entire Libertador archive of materials.
IV. Latin American Scholarship
a. UNICAMP doctoral theses abstracted in English. The Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo will make available its extensive collection of digitized PhD dissertations (3,487 as of October 2004) in the following subject areas: agricultural engineering, art, biology, chemical engineering, computer sciences, dentistry, economics, education, geography, humanities and philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, medicine, nutrition, and physics. English- language abstracts of theses from this collection will be harvested and made searchable for full-text electronic retrieval.
b. UNM Consortium of the Americas for Interdisciplinary Science (CAIS): The Consortium of the Americas for Interdisciplinary Science, with NSF funding, actively supports peer institutional collaborations between Latin America and UNM in interdisciplinary science. The consortium has the strong participation of several Latin American institutions of research and higher learning and the national laboratories in New Mexico. Research focuses include modeling the spread of disease in the region and scholarship through the consortium in this area complements the LASM content. Negotiations are in progress to include CAIS's lecture series in the UNM institutional repository and make them available through the harvester.
c. Scholarly Paper Pre -, E-prints: Where IRs archive existing collections, a pre- or E-print service provides a venue for original first-time open-access publishing in a specific discipline. It provides for early review of new ideas and ever more mature versions based on readers' comments. In this project, E-prints will be harvested and thus provide cross-disciplinary exposure and stimulate scholarly innovation. We expect that links between social medicine, historical information, current events, and theses from Latin America will create similar scholarly innovations and knowledge communities as occurred in the science and technology fields where open access concepts and pre-prints are widely used.
V. Content for K-12 Teachers from Spanish and Portuguese Sources a. UNM/LAII Resources for Teaching About the Americas (RetaNet). UNM's harvester will incorporate metadata from RetaNet, a web site aimed at K-12 educators, that provides teaching modules with links to additional curriculum resources, study suggestions for LADB news stories, a searchable database, and lesson plans about Latin America. (http://retanet.unm.edu/)
b. Images/Photographs of Latin America Photos taken by scholars in Latin America will be metatagged/indexed and made available in OAI format. There are currently 200 digitized images of the region selected for their value to K-12 teachers as curriculum resources. The photo archives will be updated twice a year with new content from researchers.
c. Brazilian photos collection and Brazil study guides (for teaching Portuguese and Brazil studies) The Brazil Slide Series holds 1000 photographs with teaching guides, formerly only available in hard copy at a cost of $50 for each topic. The series is already digitized. A series of teaching guides on Brazil, produced at UNM, is currently only available in print form, and for a fee. They are being digitally converted. As part of UNM's contribution to the project, both the photo/slides and study guides and the Brazil teaching guides will be indexed into OAI- compatible format and made fully available electronically through the TICFIA grant.
The UNM Harvester for Creating Knowledge Streams in the Americas opens important doorways for information access, reciprocity, and exchange through the use of innovative technology. TICFIA funding will make possible significant advances in scientific research, applied results, and educational outreach through the collaboration of UNM and its Latin American partners, Universidad de Guadalajara, UNICAMP and Universidad Simón Bolívar.