February 16, 2004 Handbook of Latin American Studies Implements Online Protocol

The Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS ) Online, edited by the Library of Congress Hispanic Division, is the first Library database to implement the “OpenURL” protocol. OpenURL provides a standardized mechanism for linking from citations and bibliographic records to Web services such as full text, library catalogs and Web search engines. Institutions with a local link resolver - Web-linking software - may now link directly from HLAS Online records to the Web resources of their choice.

This project is the result of the collaborative efforts of the Library of Congress and the Princeton University Library.

Updated weekly, HLAS Online, available at https://memory.loc.gov/hlas, contains more than 300,000 bibliographic citations, annotations and bibliographic essays on works published from 1935 to the present. OpenURL links are available for the Machine-Readable Cataloging - MARC 21 - bibliographic records from Volume 50 (1990) forward. At this time, non-MARC records from Volumes 1-49 do not contain sufficiently structured metadata to generate useful OpenURLs.

Continuously published since 1936, the Handbook of Latin American Studies, a multidisciplinary bibliography on Latin America, consists of works selected and annotated by respected scholars from around the world. Edited by the staff of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and published by the University of Texas Press, the print version of the handbook alternates annually between the social sciences and the humanities, examining works published in anthropology, economics, geography, government and politics, international relations, sociology, art, history, literature, music and philosophy. In addition, the handbook surveys newly emerging topics, such as ethnoarchaeology, environmental degradation and the use of GIS (Geographic Information System) tools in current research.

The Library of Congress is grateful to Princeton for its cooperation and assistance with this project and acknowledges the guidance generously provided by Walt Crawford of RLG (originally known as Research Libraries Group).

For information on setting up connections between HLAS Online and local OpenURL link resolvers, go to https://memory.loc.gov/hlas/openurl.sysadmin.html. Questions or comments regarding HLAS Online and OpenURL may be addressed to hlas@loc.gov.

For more information about the collections and activities of the Library's Hispanic Division, visit its Web site at www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic.