ONLINE: Collecting Latin America in COVID Times
press release: David Woken, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Librarian, Joseph Regenstein Library
The worldwide COVID-19 crisis is having ripple effects across library collections and poses special challenges to area studies collections. Already weak publishing markets in Latin America have been devastated by COVID-related economic downturns and government austerity, while decades-long disinvestment in area studies in the global North has accelerated and deepened. This talk will discuss the evolving publishing and scholarly communications networks in Latin America, and how Latin Americanist librarians (and other area studies specialists) are responding to this crisis to ensure that equitable North-South exchange and scholarly rigor are not casualties of the current moment. This will include discussion of print versus digital formats, the promise and limitations of open access publication, the challenges of collecting unusual formats, materials produced by marginalized communities, gray literature, and other sources that do not intersect with large-scale publishing and distribution in the global North, and the challenges of building strong collections that respond to our changing means and methods of communication.
Free and open to the public, but registration is required.