September 29, 1995

Contact: Guy Lamolinara (202) 707-9217
Dolores Martin, Hispanic Division (202) 707-5405

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Handbook of Latin American Studies Released on CD-ROM

The Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress has released the Handbook of Latin American Studies CD-ROM: HLAS/CD, Vols. 1-53, containing nearly 250,000 records on a single compact disk. This CD-ROM is the result of a collaborative agreement signed in November 1994 by representatives of the Library of Congress, the Fundacion MAPFRE America (Madrid) and the University of Texas Press, publisher of the print edition of the Handbook. Additional financial support was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York.

During the past 50 years, the print edition of the Handbook of Latin American Studies has been prepared by hundreds of scholars for the Hispanic Division. This annual, selective and annotated bibliography has gained a reputation as an indispensable tool for conducting research on Latin America. The long-awaited HLAS/CD is an extremely powerful bibliographic source for Latin Americanist scholars of the humanities and the social sciences.

Like the print volumes, the CD-ROM will include annotated bibliographic citations, as well as introductory essays highlighting important trends and research developments. The CD- ROM features context-sensitive assistance in both English and Spanish, as well as two user levels, novice and expert. Searches may be conducted by any combination of fields (author, title, description, annotation, subject, volume, item number, year) and may also be restricted to type of record (bibliographic citation, introductory essay or both). The HLAS/CD interface uses the BRS Search engine, which allows users to select from eight Boolean and proximity operators. Search results may be saved or printed for later use.

The retrospective version was produced by Fundacion MAPFRE America's Digital Publications Division, DIGIMAP. The volumes were processed in three stages. For the first 43 volumes, the project involved electronically scanning the corresponding print volumes of the Handbook, passing the results through optical character recognition programs, proofreading each volume's data, tagging the resulting data with field designators and submitting each file to a quality control test. For volumes 44-49, the data were extracted from the typesetting tapes, thus eliminating the scanning and proofreading stages; likewise for volumes 50-53, for which the data were extracted from the Handbook's on-line working file at The Library of Congress.

The HLAS/CD was demonstrated in Washington, D.C., at the annual Latin American Studies Association conference, Sept. 28-30.

The minimum requirements for using the HLAS/CD are a 486 personal computer with 4 MB of RAM (8 MB recommended), DOS 5.0 or higher, Windows 3.1 or higher, a hard disk with at least 1 MB of available memory and a CD-ROM drive.

The HLAS/CD may be purchased for $150 from the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713; telephone (512) 471-7233; fax (512) 320-0668.

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PR 95-132
9/29/95
ISSN 0731-3527