Developing and Managing the Brown University Library Collections
Collection Policies by Subject:  Latin American Studies

• Library Liaisons:
  Patricia_Figueroa@brown.edu
• Departmental Library Representative (DLR): 
  Susan_Hirsch@brown.edu

• Description of the Academic Program | Center for Latin American Studies Home Page
  Brown University first approved the Latin American Studies (LAS) undergraduate concentration in 1973. The concentration was later incorporated into the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), established in November 1984. CLAS eventually came under the umbrella of the Watson Institute for International Studies as one of its affiliated centers. The mission of the Center emphasizes research and teaching, but also includes community outreach for public education.

  On January 2002, The Watson Institute and its affiliated centers moved to a new building designed by Rafael Viöoly Architects. The three-story, 56,000-square-foot structure is located at 111 Thayer and consolidates into one place the Institute's programs, once dispersed across five campus locations.

  CLAS administers an undergraduate concentration with a multidisciplinary perspective. It is designed to develop understanding of the governments, culture, history, and contemporary issues in Latin America by combining social, literary, political, and econ omic factors. The concentration allows undergraduate students to choose freely from a wide range of subject matter. Students may design their own course of study by pursuing detailed knowledge of a particular region, a set of countries or a pertinent prob lem in Latin America.

  CLAS offers no advance degree in Latin American Studies, but the faculty work closely with interested graduate students in other departments such as Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Economics, Hispanic Studies, History, Political Science, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Sociology and the M.A. program offered in Development Studies.

  For a complete list of the interdisciplinary courses offered through this program visit the Center for Latin American Studies course page

Database of Honors, Masters, and Ph.D Theses
• Overview of the Collection
  The LAS collection at Brown University Library consists of ca. 25,204 titles of which 115 are currently received Latin American related journals and newspapers. Most titles are housed at the Rockefeller Library.

  Latin American history (F1200 - 3799, Es):	1,416
  Latin American politics (Js):	20,443
  Latin American economy and sociology (Hs):	6,132
  Latin American geography and anthropology (Gs):	637
  Latin American education (Ls):	336
  Latin American law (Ks):	175
  Latin American religion (Bs):	747
  Latin American bibliographies (Zs):	707
  Latin American online databases:	5
  Total:	25,204

• General Collecting Guidelines
  As used in this report, Latin America refers to the nations, colonies, territories, and commonwealths that extend from the southern border of the United States to Cape Horn in the South American continent, including the islands of the Caribbean. Although Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Latin America form the bulk of the collection, French, Dutch, and English-speaking entities are also included.

  The purpose of the Latin American Studies collection is to support the needs of:
  
  

  • Students and faculty from the undergraduate LAS concentration offered by the Center for Latin American Studies at Brown.
  • Brown University graduate students and faculty from other departments or programs.
  • Visiting scholars from the Watson Institute for International Studies.
  • Scholars participating in the fellowship program of the John Carter Brown Library (JCB).
  • The Latin American Studies Consortium of New England (LASCNE) which unites the Latin American Studies programs of the University of Connecticut, Brown University, the University of Massachusetts, and Yale University in a public-private, tri-state part nership to expand and improve teaching and research on Latin America and the Caribbean in the greater New England region.

  The LAS collection development policy focuses on the curriculum of the CLAS program, collecting primarily the history and social sciences of Mexico, Cuba and Brazil. This focus is a result of Brown's membership in LASCNE, which coordinates geographic spec ialization among its members. All three countries are collected at the research level from the 15th Century to the present. The history and social sciences of the remaining countries of Latin America are collected at the study/research level from the seco nd-half of the 19th Century to the present. This intermediate level of collecting allows the selector to acquire all relevant English language publications and selective foreign language editions.

  The collection also complements the holdings of the JCB, a unique resource of primary and secondary materials concerning the colonial Americas. For the period expanding from the travels of Columbus to the independence of the former European colonies, the LAS collection does not concentrate on any particular geographical area within Latin America. The materials pertaining to the colonial territories that now form Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean Islands are collected at the research leve l. In an effort to unify the collection in what concerns other Spanish travels of exploration, the LAS collection also acquires selectively materials pertaining to the initial colonization of the Philippines, particularly when dealing with religion and na tural history. Resources pertaining to Portuguese exploration outside of the Americas are collected though the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies collection which, based on the curriculum of the department, is area studies in nature.

• Specific Collecting Guidelines
  • Language: Primary and secondary materials in English, Spanish, and Portuguese form the bulk of the collection, however texts in Dutch, French, Amerindian and Creole languages are also collected, particularly for the territories where those languages are spoken. Materials in Italian and German are collected selectively.

  • Imprint Date: The LAS collection is for the most part a circulating collection, limiting its acquisitions to scholarly resources published after 1800. Original manuscripts, materials published before 1800, and those considered valuable or requi ring special handling are housed in Special Collections at the John Hay Library where they do not circulate.

  • Chronological Span and geographical range: While colonial Latin America and 19th - 21st Century Mexico, Cuba and Brazil are collected at the research level, the LAS collection strives to achieve, in a more selective manner, a geographical and c hronological balance for the remaining regions of Latin America. The pre-Columbian period is of more limited interest in the Departments of Anthropology and History. Resources covering this period are shared with the Anthropology collection and acquired m ore selectively.

  • Types of Material Included: Circulating monographs are the main component of the LAS collection, however other materials such as serials, non-circulating monographs, visual and electronic resources, are collected as well.

  • Formats: The library acquires materials in all formats, with the exception of 8mm in the case of audiovisual items. The bulk of the collection is in print-based format (monographs and serials), however microfilm is still purchased for periodical archives, pamphlet collections and pre-twentieth century publications. Materials in electronic formats such as CD-ROM, DVD, DVD-ROM and online access are acquired according to their licensing agreements and their compatibility with the library's system. Audiovisual materia ls are purchased on video, or preferably DVD format. Although the Media Services Laboratory is equipped with VCRs and DVD players that can play and copy films produced with the PAL system, the NTSC system is highly preferred. All videos purchased for this collection are housed at Media Services in the Sciences Library. Music CDs are for the most part purchased by the Music Librarian and are housed at the Orwig Music Library.

  • Excluded: Introductory general-purpose textbooks whose primary function is instruction are out of the scope of this collection.

• Electronic Resources
  The library subscribes to the following five new Iberian and Latin American databases:
  

• Bases de Datos del CSIC
• Chicano Database
• Hispanic American Periodical Index (HAPI)
• INFO-LATINOAMERICA
• Latin American Database (LADB)

Another database of interest to LAS users is the Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS). HLAS is published under the auspices of the Library of Congress and is freely available on the Internet. You can access these databases from the Iberia and Latin America electronic resources link available through the Library Web page.
• Microfilm sets (selection)
  • Blacks in Brazil. 54 items (Princeton University Latin American Pamphlet Collection)
  • Black Press of Brazil = A Imprena negra no Brasi.l 31 titles spanning 1916-1969 filmed in Sao Paulo (Princeton University Latin American Pamphlet Collection).
  • Brazil's Popular Groups. A collection of materials issued by socio-political, religious, labor, and minority grass-roots organizations. Section on Blacks, Political Parties, Urban Issues, Children, and Women's Issues. Own sets for: 1966-1986; 1987-1989; Suppl. 2, 1990-1992; Suppl. 3, 1993; Suppl. 4, 1994.
  • Confidential U.S. State Department central files: Cuba, 1955-1959. U. S. State Department.
  • Daily Report, Latin America and Western Europe. U. S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). 1978-
  • Latin American Pamphlets from the Yale University Library. Miscellaneous. Brazil. Fiche 1-127.
  • Latin American Pamphlets from the Yale University Library. Miscellaneous. Cuba. Fiche 1-46.
  • Latin America, Special Studies Series. 1962-1980; 1980-1982; 1982-1985; 1985-1988; 1989-1991.
  • Medina's Biblioteca Hispano-Americana. Microfilm made in 1941 of the original Medina Collection located in the Biblioteca Nacional de Santiago de Chile. Based on Medina's bibliography, the collection is a history of the Spanish-speaking peoples of the western hemisphere. The collection includes approximately 8,000 titles. An index is available. Film collection is located in both the Rockefeller Library and the John Hay Library.
  • Racial Groups in Brazil. Pamphlets and periodicals. (Princeton University Latin American Pamphlet Collection).
  • The Women's Movement in Cuba, 1898-1958: the Stoner Collection on Feminism. The collection, compiled from Cuban archives covers the period from Cuban independence following the Spanish-American War to the end of the Batista Regime providing information on Cuban women in politics, Cuban feminism, Cuban women's literature, and the legal status of Cuban women, 1898-1940.

• Serials
  The Serials Department at BUL currently subscribes to 115 LAS related journal publications and 3 newspapers -- La Jornada (Mexico), La Folha de SÑo Paulo (Brazil) and Nuevo Dâa (Puerto Rico). With most newspapers available on the Internet, the library prefers to focus its funds on new journals titles, however the need for more varied Latin American newspaper archives is acknowledged and should be fulfilled in the future depending on budget allocations and one-time money gifts.

• Approval plan
  A Spanish approval plan will be established at the start of the 2003-2004 academic/fiscal year with the Spanish vendor Iberbook Internacional S.L. The plan will follow the guidelines of the current Hispanic and Latin American Studies collection development policies drafted in August 2002. It intends to serve principally the ongoing needs of faculty and students in the Hispanic Studies department for current Spanish publications pertaining to the language and literature of Spain and Spanish-speaking Latin America, and selected periods of the history of Spain. The plan also intents to provide current Latin American history monographs of Spanish origin to support the curriculum of the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS). Its goal is not only to build a core collection of Spanish bibliographic resources that will satisfy present needs, but also to foresee future changes in academic trends. The plan's profile has been created to maintain a Spanish monographic collection at the research level.

• Latin American Studies Consortium of New England (LASCNE)
  Brown is a founding member of the Latin American Studies Consortium of New England, which also includes the Council on Latin American Studies at Yale, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The Consortium is now in its fourteenth year.

  LASCNE unites these Latin America Studies programs in a public/private, tri-state partnership to expand and improve teaching and research on Latin America and the Caribbean in the greater New England region. The consortium pursues this mission through:
  
  

  • Formal academic programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels
  • Faculty and student exchanges
  • Scholarly conferences and colloquia
  • Support of faculty and graduate student research
  • Public outreach programs
  
  A comprehensive array of area courses covering all of Latin America and the Caribbean is available to LAS students at LASCNE institutions through cooperative agreements regarding enrollment in courses and faculty exchanges. Each LASCNE program specializes in a set of Latin American and Caribbean countries. The LAS concentration at Brown University focuses on Mexico, Cuba and Brazil.

  LASCNE faculty, which number approximately 130, include some of the most distinguished scholars working on Latin America and the Caribbean today. They offer courses in traditional disciplines, as well as in professional programs for business, law, forestry and environmental studies, health and medicine, and region planning.

  The libraries of the participating institutions have an agreement to provide access and borrowing privileges for LASCNE students, faculty and visiting scholars, opening to them a resource of some 800,000 volumes and nearly 5,000 serials covering all aspects of the region. LASCNE member libraries use the consortium as a tool for collection development given that it sets the criteria for regional specialization. The LAS collection at Brown University Library focuses on Mexico, Cuba and Brazil.

• Special Collections
  The John Hay Library houses materials requiring special handling and preservation, as well as large subject-oriented collections that are maintained as discrete units. The following collections pertain to Latin America:
  • The George Earl Church Collection consists of the personal library of Colonel George Earl Church, an engineer and explorer in South America. Acquired in 1912, it contains 3,500 volumes of economic, historical, geographic, and descriptive studies of Mexico, Central and South America. Perhaps the most important item in the collection is the 18th century manuscript history of Potosi, a Bolivian mining town, once the largest city in the New World. The greatest concentration of the collection, however, is late 18th and 19th century works on politics, history, and science. Materials on anthropology and Native American languages are also well represented.
  • The Paul R. Dupee Mexican History Collection. With but one exception, the Dupee Collection's more than 340 books, broadsides, pamphlets, and periodicals were published after the Mexican republic secured its independence in 1821. Most are Spanish-language sources written by Mexican citizens and published in Mexico. The bulk of the materials falls into the period 1821-50, covering the first decades of Mexican independence and that nation's war with the United States. The collection's nearly 200 broadsides chronicle Mexican partisan politics, religious and anti-clerical debates, popular literature and drama, domestic revolutions and armed conflict with the United States.
  • Schirmer Collection on Anti-Imperialism Collection now numbers almost 950 titles dealing with the Anti-Imperialist movement of 1898 and its repercussions in United States, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Filipino history.
  • The John Hay Manuscript Collection contains papers, books, manuscripts related to United States political and economic involvement in Latin America during John Hay's tenure as Secretary of State.
  • The Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection contains works on the military history of each country in Latin America. The printed material is supplemented by many original watercolors depicting military events and regimented costume.
  • The Marsh Collection of Sheet Music includes music from Cuba and other Latin American countries.

• Breakdown of Subjects and Key to Collecting Levels

• New Titles Cataloged

• Related Collections and Other Resources
  John Carter Brown Library
  The JCB is an independently administered and funded center for advanced research in history and the humanities, located at Brown University since 1901. Its internationally renowned collection of Americana focuses on historical sources describing the discovery, exploration, settlement, and growth of the European colonies in the New World from 1492 to 1835. The collection includes over 45,000 rare books (printed before ca. 1825) and over 16,000 reference books and secondary sources (printed after ca. 1825). Most well-known, perhaps, are the Library's extensive holdings in the literature of European exploration and travel in the Western Hemisphere, from the first Latin edition of the Columbus letter of 1493, through nearly all of the contemporary narratives of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English discovery, exploration, and settlement. The Library's collection of pre-1800 German and Italian books about America is among the richest in the United States.
  
  In December 2001 the JCB completed cataloguing of its Brazilian imprints and launched the Código Brasiliense. The Código consists of the first government documents printed in Brazil after the relocation to America at the end of 1807 of the king of Portugal, D. João VI, along with the entire royal court. These laws, decrees, alvarás, and similar documents dating from 1808 are now for the first time available on the Internet.
  
  In November 2002, the JCB acquired one of the world's rarest and most coveted books on colonial Brazil. Cultura e opulencia do Brasil por suas drogas e minas, a 1711 publication written by an Italian Jesuit, João Antonio Andreoni. Printed in Lisbon in 1711, the book was published by Father Andreoni (1649-1716) under the pseudonym André João Antonil. When the work was published, the king of Portugal feared the information it revealed about Brazil's lucrative sugar industry and gold mines would arouse envy and lead to aggression by other nations. Consequently, he ordered the seizure and suppression of Andreoni's book; only seven copies are known to have survived.
  
  Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology
  Overlooking historic Mount Hope Bay in Bristol, Rhode Island, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology is Brown University's only major museum. Originally named the King Philip Museum, it was founded in the early 1900s as the private collection of Rudolf F. Haffenreffer. The museum contains outstanding archaeological and ethnographic collections from Latin America. Among its 100,000 objects, the Haffenreffer Museum has cataloged a South American ethnographic collection containing 2,750 items, including pre-Columbian artifacts such as the earliest known wool tapestries from Peru.

  Annmary Brown Memorial Collection
  The Incunabula Collection is part of the Annmary Brown Memorial Collection and contains two works published by Juan Pablos, the first printer in the New World. These works are:
  
  

  • Jeannes Gerson. Tripartito del christianissimo y consolatorio doctor Juan Gerson de doctrina christiana: a qualquiera muy p[ro]uechosa. / Traduzido de latin en le[n]gua castellana para el bie[n] d[e] muchos necessario. Impresso en Mexico: En casa de Juan Cromberger. Por ma[n]dado y a costa del. R.S. obispo de la mesma ciudad fray Jua[n] ­umarraga. Reuisto y examinado por su mandado., Aöo de M.d.xliiij. [1544]
  • Tenuxtitla, Mexico. Archdiocese. Constituciones del arcobispado y prouincia de la muy ynsigne y muy leal ciudad de Tenuxtitla[n], Mexico [1556]

  The Virginia Baldwin Orwig Music Library
  The Orwig Music Library, one of the libraries comprising the Brown University Library system, houses the general music collection on campus: music books, scores, periodicals, sound recordings, videotapes and microforms. The collection supports the curriculum of the Music Department and includes recordings of music from various regions in Latin America and Spain.
  
  
  Illustration: Urio. Cuba Libre. Chromolithograph, circa 1873. Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, John Hay Library.

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