- Email: [email protected]
Latin American serials: Trends and developments
LATIN AMERICANSERIALS: TRENDSAND DEVELOPMENTS
David Block and Peter A. Stern As Latin America becomes more a part of the world economy, its information resources are entering wider circulation. Immigrant populations, resident in major North American cities, have produced a demand for periodicals now filled by Spanish and Portuguese-language distributors there. ’ Mexican newspapers now appear alongside their counterpart publications in Lexis-Nexis, and the World Wide Web holds an incredible variety of electronic resources from throughout the region.2 However, these changes have only begun to alter traditional publishing patterns. As with the rest of the developing world, Latin America remains, and is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, a paper-based publishing area, producing for a small internal, and an even-smaller external, market. Furthermore, scholarly journal publication, one of the primary themes that concerns us here, is governed by a set of structures and nuances that sets it apart from publishing in the First World. Latin America’s current mix of exotic and familiar, of unique and standard provides a set of themes for our description and analysis. Block is Ibero-American
Bibliographer, Cornell University, 504 Olin Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853,607-255-9480
; and Stern is
Bibliographer for Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003,413-545-0058 [email protected].>.
-LATINAMERICANSERIALS-
BACKGROUND
THE REGION As used in this paper, Latin America refers to the land mass of the Western Hemisphere stretching from
VOL. 23, No. 4 (WINTER 1997)
37
Table 1 Latin American Basic Statistics Area (km in millions)
Argentia Bolivia Brazil
2.8
Chile Costa Rica Cuba Mexico Peru Uruguay Venezuela
.75 .05 1 .I I 2.0 1.3 ,173 ,882
Source:
1.1
Population
Literacy
GDP
(millions) 34.3 7.9
(‘5) 93 80 80
CUSSbillions) 271 18.3 886.3
94 93 94 87 82 96 90
97.7 19.3 13.7 740 73.6 2.3 178.3
8.5
World Factbook (1996).
Mexico to Tierra de1 Fuego and the major Spanishspeaking islands of the Caribbean. In geophysical terms-climate, altitude, vegetation-it is one of the most varied regions of the world. The socio-economic statistics cited in Table 1 further emphasize Latin America’s diversity. What gives Latin America its regional coherence is a common Iberian heritage-Spanish and Portuguese as dominant languages and similar approaches to law and commerce. The recent, remarkable opening of political space in the region adds an additional common characteristic.
THE CONTEXTS OFSERIALSPUBLISHINGIN LATIN AMERICA
The development of Latin American serials collections has yet to receive extensive treatment in the literature. In a standard source, the ALA-published Selection of Library Materials for Area Studies, the Latin Americanist authors, like their counterparts writing about other Third World areas, do little more than identify periodical titles.3 Contrast this approach with Luke Swindler’s recent article, “Serials Collection Development,” which not only names important titles in various subjects but also lays out in some detail the strategies and tools available to librarians working with publications from the developed world.” In addition to differences in its depth of analysis, Swindler’s essay takes a very different emphasis than those about Latin America. Swindler writes in the context of the all-too-familiar “serials crisis”: commercial publishers dominate Scientific/Technical/Medical (STM) publishing; scholarly societies see journals as money makers; libraries have become the only customers for some publications; serials expendi-
38
160 14.2 3.1 1I.1 92.2 23 3.2 21
SERIALSREVIEW
tures thus undermine libraries capacities to meet the programmatic needs of their parent institutions. But Swindler’s list is largely irrelevant to Latin America. There science publication has not been commodified; scholarly societies underwrite the cost of their publications; library sales, especially to those in the United States, are an invisible market segment. And as a result, serials expenditures are not a clear and present danger to materials budgets. The earliest Latin American serials, which began publication in the Eighteenth century, grew out of the activities of academies formed to modernize regions of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. This institutional sponsorship of periodical publications continues to characterize Latin American scholarly communication. Thus subvention, rather than subscription, drives publication patterns. Nowhere is this relationship more evident than on the front matter of journal issues where “exchange solicited” appears well in advance, or often to the exclusion, of any subscription price. There is also a commercial component of Latin American serials. For example, current events, fashion and sports periodicals are published for profit. However, only the first of these is collected widely outside the country of publication. And while current events publications commonly cost in the hundreds of dollars per year, their recent price increases have been driven more by rising international postal rates than by inflationary subscription fees.
PUBLISHINGSTATISTICS A further contrast between Latin American serials and those of the developed world lies in the realm of bibliographic control. Published studies, such as those
-DAVIDBI,OCKANDPETERA.STERN-
appearing in Serials Review in 1992 and 1993, point to the lack of basic data on the numbers and subject content of Latin American periodicals. In the breach, authors cite the number of titles from the region that appear in periodical indexes, which makes for an estimate of ca. 1,500-2,500, or the holdings of major library collections in the United States.’ Using the latter approach, Terry Peet reports that the Library of Congress acquires some 1,500 serial titles by purchase
and more than 10,000 on exchange.6 While these are significant figures on any scale, even the Library of Congress is unable to cover the full range of publications, which includes large numbers of fashion and sports periodicals that are out of scope for research and short-lived literary magazines that are extremely difficult to acquire. As a final estimate of the order of magnitude of serials publishing in Latin America, we offer Table 2, compiled from searches of the Ulrich’s Plus CD-ROM. This source pegs Latin American regional serials publication at nearly 8,000 titles. While the table total falls well short of enumerating the universe of Latin American titles, it offers a reasonable model of national distribution. The most significant feature of a country array is its illustration of the stratification of serial publication in the region. Three countries-Argentina, Brazil and Mexico--produced 4,234 of the region’s titles. Thus sixteen percent of the Latin American countries publish over half of the region’s serial titles, a statistic that underlines traditional library emphasis on these countries. A second, significant tier, consisting of Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela, produces another quarter of the total, leaving the less than twenty percent of the citations to the remaining seven countries.
Table 2 Serials Publishing in the Latin American Region Country
Titles in Database
Brazil Mexico Argentina Colombia Venezuela Cuba Chile Peru Uruguay Costa Rica Ecuador Bolivia Panama Dominican Republic Guatemala Paraguay Guatemala Honduras Total
04
f 992
1,913 1,182 1,139 534 468 416 401 363 314 180 170 130 117 105 94 76 63 61 7,721
.
1993
PRICETRENDS
Since 1992, Scott Van Jacob has compiled a price index for Latin American periodicals. Using cost statistics supplied by the Faxon Company, the Library of
f
1 QQ4
f
1
i
99s
1998
Figure 1 Latin American Periodicals Prices V0~.23,No.4 (WINTER 1997) 39
Congress and the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Van Jacob provides figures for all of Latin America and aggregates by subject and format cluster (e.g., humanities, newspapers), by individual country and by region (Caribbean, Central America, South America, Mexico).7 Figure 1, based on Van Jacob’s tables, summarizes mean prices for periodicals without including newspapers. Five years of data show remarkably stable periodicals prices. As an index, with 1992 as its base year, the regional mean for 1996 stands at 106.93. Subregions show wider variation, although the sharp (thirty-six percent) rise in Central American subscription prices is due to a drop in the number of subscriptions reported by Van Jacob’s sources.
GENRESANDFORMATS SCIENCEPUBLICATIONS Most libraries in the United States and Western Europe, even those with extensive serial holdings in Latin American studies, overlook the region’s scientific journals. Traditional assessments of science in Latin America as substandard and derivative (besides betraying a not-so-subtle Anglo- or Eurocentric outlook) have more recently begun to yield to a more nuanced appreciation of the strengths which cultural and linguistic familiarity can bring to disciplines in the natural and biological sciences. Several recent essays have pointed out scientific strengths of Latin America.* However, due to the region’s poor representation in indexing sources, we are not currently able to support our counter-suggestion on the quality of Latin American science with quantitative evidence. The major “Latin American” tools, The Hispanic American Periodicals Index and The Handbook of Latin American Studies, are annual compilations in their paper formats which do not lend themselves to the currency so essential to scientific research. Furthermore, with only a few exceptions, both virtually ignore “hard’ science journals from Latin America. Disciplinary indexes only begin to till the lacuna; The Institute for Scientific Information analyzes only forty-nine titles from the region. Clearly the law of supply and demand is at play here; most scientists are apt to read languages other than Spanish or Portuguese. However, the assumption that English has become a scientific lingua franca is a dangerous one at a time when topics such as Amazonian ecology and the climatic effects of El Nifio have become more than merely regional concerns.
40
SERIALSREVIEW
BUSINESSTRENDS The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bipolar world order has led to a diminution of the very causes which first fueled the meteoric rise of Latin American studies in the United States. The crusade against Marxism, which formed the underpinnings of the boom in Latin American studies from the 1950s to the 1980s has been replaced by a frenetic search for profits as free-market enterprise sweeps the globe. Not surprisingly, many new serial publications focusing on investment and business in Latin America have emerged since 1990. These publications range from the general to the highly specific; there are bulletins on the business climate in individual Latin nations, reports on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and even serials on finance and capital markets in Latin America. Two salient features of this boom are that many of the new publications are in English, in order to more directly appeal to business firms, and that they are comparatively expensive, which puts them out of the reach (or the scope) of most academic libraries.
ELECTRONICRESOURCES Digitital resources are now a part of the Latin American information landscape. While some material has appeared on CD-ROM, most of the action is currently on the Internet. The transition from disk to network dates from the opening of Latin American economies to free market principles and their consequent “rewiring” by new private telecommunications companies, most within the past five years. The advent of the World Wide Web, as part of the TCP/IP protocol, rapidly advanced the development of the Internet, so that now every country in the region has connections. Compact disks have been produced in several areas of Latin America. Mexico’s Universidad de Colima pioneered this technology and currently publishes dozens of products, including a few serial titles such as Revista Nexos (1987-1994), Revista mexicana de comunicacibn and Anuies (1972- 1994). In Peru, the venerable social sciences journal Revista Andina (nos. l-20) has appeared on a CD sponsored by the Spanish Mapfre Foundation. This product provides searchable text, formatted like the paper edition, and all illustrations, linked to the text files. The most promising development in serials CD publishing is the appearance of statistical annuals. Examples include the recently published Anuario Estadistico de la RepLiblica Argentina 1995 (Buenos Aires: INDEC, 1996) and Anuario
- DAVIDBI,OCKANDPETERA.STERN-
Latin American Government
Documents Project
This is the front page to a project that organizes and describea the many Latin Amerioan official documents now appearing on t@ Internet It consists of a series of tables that groups similar kinds of publications, briefly summarizes their contents and provides tit&s to the appro$Xtatelevel Of the source server, thus: ~Country I-t--Y 11 l&-y
Project Qbjeetives: The project will explore two classic issues of bibliography, curmncy and textual integrity, or more precisely how a combination of software and human intervention might bring these issues into balance as infotmation technology changes. As with documents printed on paper, the producing agency beam princi responsibility for currency, However, when these materials are “published”on ftp servers, links to the electronic source must be ~ntin~ly verif-@ ted. The project wiil utitize link checker software attached to ita server for verification of the Latin Amtican electronicsowox As sites change the tables will alert readers with two typea of notations. A memage in ‘r’eilw~notesa problem and the administmtor’saction and sectiondate. A message in Red indicates that the administratorhas exhau&d his investigation and declamd this site no longer in operabon. Textual integrity is a more complex issue. For print materials, control is maintained by blication data (e.g. editions, versions, publication dates, unctions. When the publisher becomes both source and editor’s comments) and the archiving of physical objects. one of the library’sprincipal p” archivisf textual integrity is endang&ed.‘This is especially true of government documents where publications are subject to the whims of political change. A way of monitoring changes in source documents, through version notes or other editorial statements or perhaps through text processing software at some point, is essential in preserving one of the bases of scholarship. Mi~ng government sites, through the use of computer software, to insure a back up of these valuable materials is also a priority. Documents: At its outset the project wit1 limit itself to terra firme, induding the Latin American republicaon the mainlands of North, Central and South America and excluding the Caribbean.The tabled summaries include the following document types: l
&&#cal
sourqg . .
0 &33itI .ve~~
.
0 Nationaf Judmt~
David Block dbI~~c~~iI.~u
Figure 2 Latin American Documents Project Homepage estdstico 1996, version 1.O. (La Paz: Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, 1997). In 1993 the Chile Z~fo~u~io~ Project (CHIP), an English-language summary of national events translated from Chilean media, became the region’s first electronic journal. Initially circulated to subscribers by electronic mail, CIIIP has now established itself on the WWW, with daily issues and a
-LATINAMERICANSERIALS-
substantial backfile. Lexis-Nexis has at present more than forty Latin American newspapers, news agencies, or financial services available in full-text. The substitution of online for print resources in libraries is a growing trend, both as a money-saver and as a supplement to traditional information sources. At present there are a number of online vendors in the United States which will supply articles on demand,
VOL. 23, No. 4 (WINTER 1997)
41
enabling library patrons to acquire articles from journals to which their libraries do not subscribe. One major Argentine bookseller has inaugurated a similar service for journal articles, furnishing tables of contents online and for a fee promising mail or fax delivery of articles. Whether this represents a bold, but solitary, experiment remains to be seen. But the substitution of virtual for hard copy information in the serials world is an emerging trend, and one which holds the promise of overcoming the difficulties of time and space which have always plagued the exchange of Latin American serials. The Internet has changed the face of serials publishing in Latin America. Within a very brief time venerable news magazines, such as Peru’s Curetus chttp://www.rcp.net.pe/ CARETAS> and Mexico’s Proceso, mounted electronic editions. Newspapers followed, and at this writing, an Internet connection and Web browser evoke news sources from the Rio Grande to the Southern Cone. A good source for Latin American news publications is the Latin American Newspage at the University of California, San Diego chttp:Ngort.ucsd.edu/news/hc.html>. However, the advantages of Web publishing (access and timeliness) cannot disguise its defects, both planned and unforeseen. Since newspaper publishers are not willing to undermine the sale of their paper products, usually only the front page of a daily paper, or short summaries of its content, are available on the Web. Few, if any, maintain electronic backliles, and long delays due to heavy Internet traffic can make reading a newspaper from half a world away an agonizing exercise in frustration. At the present, Web newspapers are a good way to gain quick and timely information on current events; they will not be dependable sources for in-depth research until substantial economic and technological hurdles have been cleared. Latin American governments have seen the Internet as a way to establish a modernizing image on an emerging electronic stage. Many government serial publications, especially the annual reports written by executive departments and directory information for all sectors of government, have become a hallmark of these govemment sites. Other kinds of information never widely available outside the home countries, such as presidential speeches and legislative calendars, are now published on publicly-accessible file servers. And commercial interests are asserting themselves through password-protected subscription services in economics and law. For an introduction to government serials on the Internet, see the Latin American Documents Project
42
SERIALSREVIEW
. This site organizes Latin American government publications into categories-statistics, executive documents, legislative documents, judicial documents and subnational documents-and provides summaries of contents and links to the sites. But as it observes, some of the most basic questions concerning the Internet which have emerged in our own country are echoed on the Web in other countries as well. Will electronic government documents replace print versions? How long, and how dependably, will governments, publishers, Non Government Organizations or academic institutions maintain their servers? Several initiatives have arisen to meet the challenge of organizing Latin American Internet contents and to use the World Wide Web as a way of providing better access to Latin American print materials. UT Lanic chttp://lanic.utexas.edu>, created at the University of Texas’ Institute of Latin American Studies, constitutes the principal gateway to Latin American electronic information. In fact, its emergence as a magnum opus has shaped the development of Latin American Internet organization along a flagship model, where much information is intentionally channeled through Lanic. The database has become a willing host to several projects from the northern and southern hemispheres. Links to these Lanic-supported initiatives appear at the top of its home page.
COLLECTIONDEVELOPMENT SELECTIONSOURCES There are no comprehensive sources that aid selection of Latin American periodical titles. National bibliographies, where they are produced, arrive too late to guide selection of current periodicals, and the catalogs of serials vendors in the United States and Western Europe are very slow to add new Latin American titles. On the other hand, indigenous vendors in Latin America itself, whose primary customers are North American academic libraries, can be extremely diligent in bringing word of new serial publications (especially those in the humanities and social sciences) to their library clients. The Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) serves as a publisher and clearing house for information on current Latin American serial publications. The SALALl Newsletter runs a regular column, “New Periodicals,” that cites and annotates titles from the region. SALALM is also pub-
- DAVIDBLOCKANDPETERA.STERN-
lishing, in parts, a guide to exchange serials under the title Serial Publications Available by Exchange. To date, volumes for the Caribbean area (1994) and Spanish South America (1996) have appeared. For information on the organization and its publications, see its home page at. The compilations prepared by Latin American export vendors furnish the major sources of information on current serials. These announcements run the gamut from periodical titles interspersed with monograph offerings to carefully crafted works such as La Rev&a chilena en venta, a reasonable facsimile of New Serial Titles. Vendor compilations are also moving from paper to electronic format. For information on Latin American export vendors and their electronic addresses, see the SALALM home page, cited above. The most reliable serials suppliers tend to correspond to book vendors, although well-known European (Swets) and North American (EBSCO) subscription agents maintain offtces in Latin America. Rather than seeming to endorse particular vendors by mentioning them here, we would refer readers to the already-cited Selection of Library Materials for Area Studies. While much has changed in Latin America since this work’s publication (1990), the lists of vendors remain remarkably up-to-date. What has changed is the number of vendors furnishing materials to US and European libraries; whereas several decades ago most countries had only one reliable supplier of books and journals, today that monopoly has been broken. Most of the “old reliable established firms” have competition from within their borders, and sometimes from without. Collecting libraries around the world have been the beneficiaries of this remarkable new free market in scholarly materials.
COOPERATIVESERIALSCOLLECTION DEVELOPMENT
Latin American Project have divided some 300 Argentine and Mexican serial titles and have taken responsibility for monitoring current receipts and providing copies of tables of contents for posting on Lanic. To view the serials files, see
CONCLUSION Looking toward the new millenium, the old bi-polar paper world of books and serials remains the dominant mode of information exchange in Latin America. Publishers in the region are not likely to abandon paper any time soon as they feel the same constraints as their counterparts in the First World and have fewer resources to risk. Nevertheless, the information age has made its presence felt. Latin American information currently projects a complex spectrum of carriersbooks, journals, microforms, compact disks, full-text journal databases, bibliographic citation databases, current update and information services, etc. As digital information departs the demonstration phase and enters true production, libraries will find it very difftcult to maintain a footing in both the paper and electronic camps. Latin American serial publishers academic or commercial, while not yet subject to the same inflationary impulses as European serials, are eagerly adopting the same innovations as their First World counterparts. The years ahead will see more full-text serials available online, more document delivery features, and more current-events Web sources supplementing paper journals sitting on library shelves. Stay tuned.
NOTESANDREFERENCES The emergence of new technologies has revived cooperation in the building of collections that support international studies. Part of the motivation for this new cooperative impulse is the perceived inadequacy of library materials budgets in the face of price increases and new formats. Another springs from the possibilities offered by new digital technologies for inexpensive and timely distribution of information. Serial publications were specifically targeted in the Latin American component of the Association of Research Libraries Global Resources Program. The thirty-seven participants in
-LATINAMERICANSERIALS-
1. Examples include E. Castellon Foreign Newspapers & Magazines of Clifton, NJ, Latin American Products in Manhattan and the recently-opened Miami major daily newspaper, El Comercio.
office of Quito’s
2. The array of Lexis-Nexis resources varies over time. Consult the Mexico Library homepage for the latest list of Mexican papers. For Mexican periodicals on the World Wide Web, see .
V0~.23,No.4 (WINTER
1997) 43
3. Cecily Johns, ed. Selection of Lihruty Materials for Area Studies, Vol. 1 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1990). 4. In Marcia Tuttle, Managing JAI Press, 1996): pp. 65- 100.
Serials
(Greenwich,
CT:
5. For the index interpolation method, see Laurence Hallewell’s section, “The Economics and Sociology of Latin American Publications,” in Dan C. Hazen, ed. “Serials Acquisitions and the Third World: The Latin American Perspective: Part I,” Serials Review 18 (Winter 1992): 40-4 I. 6. Terry C. Peet, “The Routine and the Unpredictable: LC’s Experience in Bridging the Gap in Latin American SerialsAcquisitions, ” in Dan C. Hazen. ed., “Serials Acquisitions in the Third World: The Latin American Perspective: Part II,” Seriuls ReLGews19 (Spring1993): 76. 7. Van Jacob’s survey appears in Bowker Annual; see page 504 of the 1997 edition for the latest iteration. 8. See v.267 [ 10 February 19951 of Scirnce in general and “Publication Trends: Uneven Growth,” p. 808 in particular. See also M. Krauskopff et al., ‘A Citationist Perspective on Science in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1981-1993,” S&ntometrics 34 (1995): 2-25.
44
SERIALSREVIEW
David Block and Peter A. Stern As Latin America becomes more a part of the world economy, its information resources are entering wider circulation. Immigrant populations, resident in major North American cities, have produced a demand for periodicals now filled by Spanish and Portuguese-language distributors there. ’ Mexican newspapers now appear alongside their counterpart publications in Lexis-Nexis, and the World Wide Web holds an incredible variety of electronic resources from throughout the region.2 However, these changes have only begun to alter traditional publishing patterns. As with the rest of the developing world, Latin America remains, and is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, a paper-based publishing area, producing for a small internal, and an even-smaller external, market. Furthermore, scholarly journal publication, one of the primary themes that concerns us here, is governed by a set of structures and nuances that sets it apart from publishing in the First World. Latin America’s current mix of exotic and familiar, of unique and standard provides a set of themes for our description and analysis. Block is Ibero-American
Bibliographer, Cornell University, 504 Olin Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853,607-255-9480
Bibliographer for Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003,413-545-0058 [email protected].>.
-LATINAMERICANSERIALS-
BACKGROUND
THE REGION As used in this paper, Latin America refers to the land mass of the Western Hemisphere stretching from
VOL. 23, No. 4 (WINTER 1997)
37
Table 1 Latin American Basic Statistics Area (km in millions)
Argentia Bolivia Brazil
2.8
Chile Costa Rica Cuba Mexico Peru Uruguay Venezuela
.75 .05 1 .I I 2.0 1.3 ,173 ,882
Source:
1.1
Population
Literacy
GDP
(millions) 34.3 7.9
(‘5) 93 80 80
CUSSbillions) 271 18.3 886.3
94 93 94 87 82 96 90
97.7 19.3 13.7 740 73.6 2.3 178.3
8.5
World Factbook (1996).
Mexico to Tierra de1 Fuego and the major Spanishspeaking islands of the Caribbean. In geophysical terms-climate, altitude, vegetation-it is one of the most varied regions of the world. The socio-economic statistics cited in Table 1 further emphasize Latin America’s diversity. What gives Latin America its regional coherence is a common Iberian heritage-Spanish and Portuguese as dominant languages and similar approaches to law and commerce. The recent, remarkable opening of political space in the region adds an additional common characteristic.
THE CONTEXTS OFSERIALSPUBLISHINGIN LATIN AMERICA
The development of Latin American serials collections has yet to receive extensive treatment in the literature. In a standard source, the ALA-published Selection of Library Materials for Area Studies, the Latin Americanist authors, like their counterparts writing about other Third World areas, do little more than identify periodical titles.3 Contrast this approach with Luke Swindler’s recent article, “Serials Collection Development,” which not only names important titles in various subjects but also lays out in some detail the strategies and tools available to librarians working with publications from the developed world.” In addition to differences in its depth of analysis, Swindler’s essay takes a very different emphasis than those about Latin America. Swindler writes in the context of the all-too-familiar “serials crisis”: commercial publishers dominate Scientific/Technical/Medical (STM) publishing; scholarly societies see journals as money makers; libraries have become the only customers for some publications; serials expendi-
38
160 14.2 3.1 1I.1 92.2 23 3.2 21
SERIALSREVIEW
tures thus undermine libraries capacities to meet the programmatic needs of their parent institutions. But Swindler’s list is largely irrelevant to Latin America. There science publication has not been commodified; scholarly societies underwrite the cost of their publications; library sales, especially to those in the United States, are an invisible market segment. And as a result, serials expenditures are not a clear and present danger to materials budgets. The earliest Latin American serials, which began publication in the Eighteenth century, grew out of the activities of academies formed to modernize regions of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. This institutional sponsorship of periodical publications continues to characterize Latin American scholarly communication. Thus subvention, rather than subscription, drives publication patterns. Nowhere is this relationship more evident than on the front matter of journal issues where “exchange solicited” appears well in advance, or often to the exclusion, of any subscription price. There is also a commercial component of Latin American serials. For example, current events, fashion and sports periodicals are published for profit. However, only the first of these is collected widely outside the country of publication. And while current events publications commonly cost in the hundreds of dollars per year, their recent price increases have been driven more by rising international postal rates than by inflationary subscription fees.
PUBLISHINGSTATISTICS A further contrast between Latin American serials and those of the developed world lies in the realm of bibliographic control. Published studies, such as those
-DAVIDBI,OCKANDPETERA.STERN-
appearing in Serials Review in 1992 and 1993, point to the lack of basic data on the numbers and subject content of Latin American periodicals. In the breach, authors cite the number of titles from the region that appear in periodical indexes, which makes for an estimate of ca. 1,500-2,500, or the holdings of major library collections in the United States.’ Using the latter approach, Terry Peet reports that the Library of Congress acquires some 1,500 serial titles by purchase
and more than 10,000 on exchange.6 While these are significant figures on any scale, even the Library of Congress is unable to cover the full range of publications, which includes large numbers of fashion and sports periodicals that are out of scope for research and short-lived literary magazines that are extremely difficult to acquire. As a final estimate of the order of magnitude of serials publishing in Latin America, we offer Table 2, compiled from searches of the Ulrich’s Plus CD-ROM. This source pegs Latin American regional serials publication at nearly 8,000 titles. While the table total falls well short of enumerating the universe of Latin American titles, it offers a reasonable model of national distribution. The most significant feature of a country array is its illustration of the stratification of serial publication in the region. Three countries-Argentina, Brazil and Mexico--produced 4,234 of the region’s titles. Thus sixteen percent of the Latin American countries publish over half of the region’s serial titles, a statistic that underlines traditional library emphasis on these countries. A second, significant tier, consisting of Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela, produces another quarter of the total, leaving the less than twenty percent of the citations to the remaining seven countries.
Table 2 Serials Publishing in the Latin American Region Country
Titles in Database
Brazil Mexico Argentina Colombia Venezuela Cuba Chile Peru Uruguay Costa Rica Ecuador Bolivia Panama Dominican Republic Guatemala Paraguay Guatemala Honduras Total
04
f 992
1,913 1,182 1,139 534 468 416 401 363 314 180 170 130 117 105 94 76 63 61 7,721
.
1993
PRICETRENDS
Since 1992, Scott Van Jacob has compiled a price index for Latin American periodicals. Using cost statistics supplied by the Faxon Company, the Library of
f
1 QQ4
f
1
i
99s
1998
Figure 1 Latin American Periodicals Prices V0~.23,No.4 (WINTER 1997) 39
Congress and the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Van Jacob provides figures for all of Latin America and aggregates by subject and format cluster (e.g., humanities, newspapers), by individual country and by region (Caribbean, Central America, South America, Mexico).7 Figure 1, based on Van Jacob’s tables, summarizes mean prices for periodicals without including newspapers. Five years of data show remarkably stable periodicals prices. As an index, with 1992 as its base year, the regional mean for 1996 stands at 106.93. Subregions show wider variation, although the sharp (thirty-six percent) rise in Central American subscription prices is due to a drop in the number of subscriptions reported by Van Jacob’s sources.
GENRESANDFORMATS SCIENCEPUBLICATIONS Most libraries in the United States and Western Europe, even those with extensive serial holdings in Latin American studies, overlook the region’s scientific journals. Traditional assessments of science in Latin America as substandard and derivative (besides betraying a not-so-subtle Anglo- or Eurocentric outlook) have more recently begun to yield to a more nuanced appreciation of the strengths which cultural and linguistic familiarity can bring to disciplines in the natural and biological sciences. Several recent essays have pointed out scientific strengths of Latin America.* However, due to the region’s poor representation in indexing sources, we are not currently able to support our counter-suggestion on the quality of Latin American science with quantitative evidence. The major “Latin American” tools, The Hispanic American Periodicals Index and The Handbook of Latin American Studies, are annual compilations in their paper formats which do not lend themselves to the currency so essential to scientific research. Furthermore, with only a few exceptions, both virtually ignore “hard’ science journals from Latin America. Disciplinary indexes only begin to till the lacuna; The Institute for Scientific Information analyzes only forty-nine titles from the region. Clearly the law of supply and demand is at play here; most scientists are apt to read languages other than Spanish or Portuguese. However, the assumption that English has become a scientific lingua franca is a dangerous one at a time when topics such as Amazonian ecology and the climatic effects of El Nifio have become more than merely regional concerns.
40
SERIALSREVIEW
BUSINESSTRENDS The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bipolar world order has led to a diminution of the very causes which first fueled the meteoric rise of Latin American studies in the United States. The crusade against Marxism, which formed the underpinnings of the boom in Latin American studies from the 1950s to the 1980s has been replaced by a frenetic search for profits as free-market enterprise sweeps the globe. Not surprisingly, many new serial publications focusing on investment and business in Latin America have emerged since 1990. These publications range from the general to the highly specific; there are bulletins on the business climate in individual Latin nations, reports on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and even serials on finance and capital markets in Latin America. Two salient features of this boom are that many of the new publications are in English, in order to more directly appeal to business firms, and that they are comparatively expensive, which puts them out of the reach (or the scope) of most academic libraries.
ELECTRONICRESOURCES Digitital resources are now a part of the Latin American information landscape. While some material has appeared on CD-ROM, most of the action is currently on the Internet. The transition from disk to network dates from the opening of Latin American economies to free market principles and their consequent “rewiring” by new private telecommunications companies, most within the past five years. The advent of the World Wide Web, as part of the TCP/IP protocol, rapidly advanced the development of the Internet, so that now every country in the region has connections. Compact disks have been produced in several areas of Latin America. Mexico’s Universidad de Colima pioneered this technology and currently publishes dozens of products, including a few serial titles such as Revista Nexos (1987-1994), Revista mexicana de comunicacibn and Anuies (1972- 1994). In Peru, the venerable social sciences journal Revista Andina (nos. l-20) has appeared on a CD sponsored by the Spanish Mapfre Foundation. This product provides searchable text, formatted like the paper edition, and all illustrations, linked to the text files. The most promising development in serials CD publishing is the appearance of statistical annuals. Examples include the recently published Anuario Estadistico de la RepLiblica Argentina 1995 (Buenos Aires: INDEC, 1996) and Anuario
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Latin American Government
Documents Project
This is the front page to a project that organizes and describea the many Latin Amerioan official documents now appearing on t@ Internet It consists of a series of tables that groups similar kinds of publications, briefly summarizes their contents and provides tit&s to the appro$Xtatelevel Of the source server, thus: ~Country I-t--Y 11 l&-y
Project Qbjeetives: The project will explore two classic issues of bibliography, curmncy and textual integrity, or more precisely how a combination of software and human intervention might bring these issues into balance as infotmation technology changes. As with documents printed on paper, the producing agency beam princi responsibility for currency, However, when these materials are “published”on ftp servers, links to the electronic source must be ~ntin~ly verif-@ ted. The project wiil utitize link checker software attached to ita server for verification of the Latin Amtican electronicsowox As sites change the tables will alert readers with two typea of notations. A memage in ‘r’eilw~notesa problem and the administmtor’saction and sectiondate. A message in Red indicates that the administratorhas exhau&d his investigation and declamd this site no longer in operabon. Textual integrity is a more complex issue. For print materials, control is maintained by blication data (e.g. editions, versions, publication dates, unctions. When the publisher becomes both source and editor’s comments) and the archiving of physical objects. one of the library’sprincipal p” archivisf textual integrity is endang&ed.‘This is especially true of government documents where publications are subject to the whims of political change. A way of monitoring changes in source documents, through version notes or other editorial statements or perhaps through text processing software at some point, is essential in preserving one of the bases of scholarship. Mi~ng government sites, through the use of computer software, to insure a back up of these valuable materials is also a priority. Documents: At its outset the project wit1 limit itself to terra firme, induding the Latin American republicaon the mainlands of North, Central and South America and excluding the Caribbean.The tabled summaries include the following document types: l
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sourqg . .
0 &33itI .ve~~
.
0 Nationaf Judmt~
David Block dbI~~c~~iI.~u
Figure 2 Latin American Documents Project Homepage estdstico 1996, version 1.O. (La Paz: Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, 1997). In 1993 the Chile Z~fo~u~io~ Project (CHIP), an English-language summary of national events translated from Chilean media, became the region’s first electronic journal. Initially circulated to subscribers by electronic mail, CIIIP has now established itself on the WWW
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substantial backfile. Lexis-Nexis has at present more than forty Latin American newspapers, news agencies, or financial services available in full-text. The substitution of online for print resources in libraries is a growing trend, both as a money-saver and as a supplement to traditional information sources. At present there are a number of online vendors in the United States which will supply articles on demand,
VOL. 23, No. 4 (WINTER 1997)
41
enabling library patrons to acquire articles from journals to which their libraries do not subscribe. One major Argentine bookseller has inaugurated a similar service for journal articles, furnishing tables of contents online and for a fee promising mail or fax delivery of articles. Whether this represents a bold, but solitary, experiment remains to be seen. But the substitution of virtual for hard copy information in the serials world is an emerging trend, and one which holds the promise of overcoming the difficulties of time and space which have always plagued the exchange of Latin American serials. The Internet has changed the face of serials publishing in Latin America. Within a very brief time venerable news magazines, such as Peru’s Curetus chttp://www.rcp.net.pe/ CARETAS> and Mexico’s Proceso
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COLLECTIONDEVELOPMENT SELECTIONSOURCES There are no comprehensive sources that aid selection of Latin American periodical titles. National bibliographies, where they are produced, arrive too late to guide selection of current periodicals, and the catalogs of serials vendors in the United States and Western Europe are very slow to add new Latin American titles. On the other hand, indigenous vendors in Latin America itself, whose primary customers are North American academic libraries, can be extremely diligent in bringing word of new serial publications (especially those in the humanities and social sciences) to their library clients. The Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) serves as a publisher and clearing house for information on current Latin American serial publications. The SALALl Newsletter runs a regular column, “New Periodicals,” that cites and annotates titles from the region. SALALM is also pub-
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lishing, in parts, a guide to exchange serials under the title Serial Publications Available by Exchange. To date, volumes for the Caribbean area (1994) and Spanish South America (1996) have appeared. For information on the organization and its publications, see its home page at
COOPERATIVESERIALSCOLLECTION DEVELOPMENT
Latin American Project have divided some 300 Argentine and Mexican serial titles and have taken responsibility for monitoring current receipts and providing copies of tables of contents for posting on Lanic. To view the serials files, see
CONCLUSION Looking toward the new millenium, the old bi-polar paper world of books and serials remains the dominant mode of information exchange in Latin America. Publishers in the region are not likely to abandon paper any time soon as they feel the same constraints as their counterparts in the First World and have fewer resources to risk. Nevertheless, the information age has made its presence felt. Latin American information currently projects a complex spectrum of carriersbooks, journals, microforms, compact disks, full-text journal databases, bibliographic citation databases, current update and information services, etc. As digital information departs the demonstration phase and enters true production, libraries will find it very difftcult to maintain a footing in both the paper and electronic camps. Latin American serial publishers academic or commercial, while not yet subject to the same inflationary impulses as European serials, are eagerly adopting the same innovations as their First World counterparts. The years ahead will see more full-text serials available online, more document delivery features, and more current-events Web sources supplementing paper journals sitting on library shelves. Stay tuned.
NOTESANDREFERENCES The emergence of new technologies has revived cooperation in the building of collections that support international studies. Part of the motivation for this new cooperative impulse is the perceived inadequacy of library materials budgets in the face of price increases and new formats. Another springs from the possibilities offered by new digital technologies for inexpensive and timely distribution of information. Serial publications were specifically targeted in the Latin American component of the Association of Research Libraries Global Resources Program. The thirty-seven participants in
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1. Examples include E. Castellon Foreign Newspapers & Magazines of Clifton, NJ, Latin American Products in Manhattan and the recently-opened Miami major daily newspaper, El Comercio.
office of Quito’s
2. The array of Lexis-Nexis resources varies over time. Consult the Mexico Library homepage
V0~.23,No.4 (WINTER
1997) 43
3. Cecily Johns, ed. Selection of Lihruty Materials for Area Studies, Vol. 1 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1990). 4. In Marcia Tuttle, Managing JAI Press, 1996): pp. 65- 100.
Serials
(Greenwich,
CT:
5. For the index interpolation method, see Laurence Hallewell’s section, “The Economics and Sociology of Latin American Publications,” in Dan C. Hazen, ed. “Serials Acquisitions and the Third World: The Latin American Perspective: Part I,” Serials Review 18 (Winter 1992): 40-4 I. 6. Terry C. Peet, “The Routine and the Unpredictable: LC’s Experience in Bridging the Gap in Latin American SerialsAcquisitions, ” in Dan C. Hazen. ed., “Serials Acquisitions in the Third World: The Latin American Perspective: Part II,” Seriuls ReLGews19 (Spring1993): 76. 7. Van Jacob’s survey appears in Bowker Annual; see page 504 of the 1997 edition for the latest iteration. 8. See v.267 [ 10 February 19951 of Scirnce in general and “Publication Trends: Uneven Growth,” p. 808 in particular. See also M. Krauskopff et al., ‘A Citationist Perspective on Science in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1981-1993,” S&ntometrics 34 (1995): 2-25.
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