Latin America Data Base University of New Mexico University of New Mexico


All the News That's Fit to Process

by Frank D. Martinez

The following article was published in the Spring 1994 edition of Quantum magazine, a research journal published by the University of New Mexico.

These days, Latin America is a lot closer to the University of New Mexico (UNM), and the rest of the world for that matter. Give credit to changing technologies, the advent of the information age, and a rapidly growing interest in global economies and politics. All have helped contribute to the success of UNM's Latin America Data Base (LADB), which now enjoys a worldwide reputation as a reliable source for news and information about Latin America, its people, politics, and economies.

This program of the Latin American Institute offers information by computer to hundreds of subscribers. Operating much like a newsroom, the data base's five employees gather, process and distribute information from newspapers, news wires and various other print and electronic media issued throughout Latin America. From two radio antennas they pick up radio broadcasts, which are decoded, demodulated and captured on computer.

"We're in the right industry at the right time," says program manager Roma Arellano. "Our biggest challenge will be responding to a very rapidly changing industry in the right way. In the past, we've had to wait for our market to catch on."

Economies and business opportunities are hot topics. The headline on one recent SourceMex publication announces, "U.S., Mexican and Canadian Companies Announce Recent Direct Investments and Partnerships."

"Now, especially because of NAFTA, there is such a heightened interest that it's getting used by just about everyone," says Carolyn Mountain, Latin American economic and business library specialist in Parish Memorial Library. Other hot topics include human rights in Central America, international management issues, finance, securities, debt crises, the maquiladoras, and events in Chiapas.

Requests for information come from other universities, the federal labs, local businesses, larger corporations interested in technology transfer and from businesses "that need to know the economic issues at play in the countries they're into," Mountain says. "It's almost continually in use. It wasn't that way even a couple of years ago. But, there is nothing else I'm aware of where you can get information four days to a week after it's occurred."

The data base produces three publications in English, each copyrighted and registered with the Library of Congress:

Of the three publications, "SourceMex is the most widely used," says Arellano.

Current issues are sent to subscribers via electronic mail and also are stored in the data base, which is accessible via Internet. Of the 250 subscribers, most are other universities or corporations throughout the world that are interested in Latin American economic developments. Faculty and student researchers, as well as those who are simply interested in staying abreast of current developments, also are among the subscribers.

Subscription charges for each publication are $225 a year for institutions or $125 for individuals; for all three, $565 for an institution or $315 for an individual. Under the subscription option, which allows users to search current and back issues, subscribers pay a flat fee of $800 a year for unlimited use of the database. The publication/database package rate is $1,200 a year and entitles subscribers to receive current issues and have unlimited search time on the data base. The staff also offers one-time searches.

The Latin America Data Base currently gets about 15 percent of the operating budget from subscription revenues, the remainder from a federal grant. "Our goal is to decrease the amount of outside money and increase the amount we get through subscriptions," Arellano says.

One stumbling block has been the easy accessibility of the publications. "Even though they're copyrighted, if a professor from a university in Texas, for example, sends the information to colleagues at other universities, then there is no incentive for them to subscribe. The security questions get more complicated as the technology develops," she says.

Technology coupled with one faculty member's search for information provided the seed of the Latin America Data Base.

"In 1983, while tinkering with shortwave radio equipment for a UNM communications project, sociology professor Nelson Valdes found that he could pick up news broadcasts from various Latin American rebel and government radio stations," Arellano says. He believed that access to such information would be valuable to scholars frustrated by the lack of current news on the region and sensed that demand would increase in the future. His idea was to use the broadcasts to compile a data base of hard-to-find coverage on Latin America.

"At that time, communications technologies were just beginning to take off," Arellano says. Valdes also began experimenting with satellite reception of international news wires and conferencing and bulletin board networks accessible by modem. "By 1985, the University's Latin American Institute was ready to launch the Latin America Data Base project, with the objective of generating timely, comprehensive information."

The data base began as a two-person operation focused on producing two electronic bulletins or publications. They collected and combined sources, translated them from Spanish or Portuguese to English, checked facts, and rewrote to produce original chronologies, summaries and updates. The publications were distributed through two commercial databasae services and three electronic mail/conferencing networks.

In 1990, Arellano says, UNM joined the University of Miami and University of California at Los Angeles to form a database consortium on Latin America, which was funded by the federal government. The Latin America Data Base increased its staff and began publishing a third electronic bulletin. Next it linked to a local network, New Mexico Technet, which extended its reach. The staff then prepared a users manual and began marketing the concept.

Revenues have increased enough that the Latin America Data Base was able to purchased its own computer workstation, which will allow the data base to move from Technet to UNM. Arellano hopes the workstation will ultimately help the Latin America Data Base to establish an electronic clearinghouse for information on and from Latin America.

Also on the UNM campus, a computer terminal in Parish Memorial Library is dedicated to the Latin America Data Base and may be used at no cost to library patrons.

"What we can do here is give tutorials and demonstrations on how to use the Latin American Data Base," says Parish Library's Carolyn Mountain. She says there is "an increasingly high usage of the three publications," primarily by Latin American students but also by students studying community and regional planning, international management, political science, economics, public administration and others.

For the future, Arellano says staff members are monitoring trends in the industry with hopes that interest in Latin America, as well as Latin America Data Base revenues, will continue to grow, and they're working to get publications from Latin America to store in data bases.

The amount of competing information on Latin America "has exploded and there are inherent limitations to electronic publishing that the Latin America Data Base must work against," Arellano says. "However, it has achieved modest and growing success."

LADB    Latin American & Iberian Institute    MSC 02 1690    1 University of New Mexico    Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001
Telephone: (505) 277-6839    E-mail: info@ladb.unm.edu    FAX: (505) 277-5989    Last modified: 2007-05-10