Posts Tagged ‘Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez’
Author: Daisy Dominguez Published: March 25th, 2012
Lorenzo García Vega Papers, 1969-2008 at Princeton University Library
Princeton’s Manuscripts Division has recently added the papers of Lorenzo García Vega to its extensive collection of archives, manuscripts and correspondence by Latin American writers and intellectuals. A detailed description and finding aid is already available.
Lorenzo García Vega was born in 1926 in Jagüey Grande, in the province of Matanzas, Cuba. A poet living in exile since the late 1960s, García Vega is best known for his involvement in the literary group Orígenes. Over his lifetime, he has published nearly two dozen works of poetry and prose, and in 1952 won Cuba’s Premio Nacional de Literatura. García Vega became a polemical figure with the publication of Los años de Orígenes (1978), a book that offered an alternate view of the famed literary group than the one traditionally held by the Cuban reading public. Reviled for his representation of José Lezama Lima, the group’s founder, García Vega has since suffered a kind of double exile: the first from Cuba, and the second from the Cuban literary and intellectual milieu to which he formerly belonged. Despite this, writers such as Antonio José Ponte and Victor Fowler celebrate García Vega’s work, abundant with repetition and often fragmented or elliptical, for its innovation and literary radicalism.
Prominent within the Lorenzo García Vega Papers are twenty-nine notebooks in which García Vega recorded daily diary entries, ideas, drafts of poems, stories and correspondence, fragments of poems and stories, recollections of dreams, quotations, and responses to literature and art. The correspondence in the collection includes letters received by García Vega, dating from 1969 until 1996, though undated letters from Héctor Libertella regarding the manuscript of Devastación del Hotel San Luis (2007) may date into the 2000s. Most notable are multiple letters from Guido Llinás, Octavio Paz, and Manuel Díaz Martínez.
For a complete list of archives and correspondence by Latin American writers and intellectuals at the Princeton University Library, and links to finding aids, please go to http://firestone.princeton.edu/latinam/literarymss.php.
Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez
Princeton University
Tags: archives, Cuba, Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, manuscripts, Princeton University
Category News |
Author: Daisy Dominguez Published: November 15th, 2011
- Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), Untitled, no date. Mixed media on paper. 53.5 x 35.5 cm.
Thanks to the assistance of the Executive Committee for the Program in Latin American Studies, the Graphic Arts Collection of the Princeton University Library recently acquired thirty-four paintings and drawings by the novelist, critic, poet, and visual artist Severo Sarduy (1937-1993). Artifacts from his studio accompany the paintings, along with several works by his friends Roland Barthes, Jorge Camacho, and José Luis Cuevas.
View some highlights posted by Graphic Arts Curator Julie Mellby at http://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts/2011/11/severo_sarduy.html.
Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez
Princeton University
Tags: art, Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, Princeton University
Category News |
Author: Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez Published: September 15th, 2011
Dear colleagues,
I recently finished putting together this guide and thought that it would be of interest to some of you:
http://libguides.princeton.edu/laec
It lists by country and subject area all of the collections of Latin American ephemera that the Princeton University Library has developed since the late 1960s (approximately 350) and links to item level finding aids or catalog records that for the most part describe in considerable detail the contents of the collections.
Saludos,
Fernando
Tags: collection guides, collections, ephemera, Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, finding aids, Princeton, Princeton University
Category News |
Author: Daisy Dominguez Published: July 5th, 2011
Please visit http://pudl.princeton.edu/collections/pudl0025 to search Princeton’s extensive and growing collection of Latin American posters. The posters included in this digital project were created by a wide variety of social activists, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, political parties, and other types of organizations across Latin America, in order to publicize their views, positions, agendas, policies, events, and services. Even though posters produced in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Venezuela are the most abundant among the more than two thousand currently available on the site, almost every country in the region is represented. In terms of topics, some of the best represented are human rights, elections, gender issues, indigenous issues, labor, ecology and environmental issues, development, public health, and education. The Latin American Posters Collection is a component of the larger collection of Latin American ephemera that Princeton University Library has developed since the 1970s. Feel free to contact me with any comments or questions about the collection.
Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez
Princeton University
Tags: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, ephemera, Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, institutional news, Mexico, posters, Princeton University, Venezuela
Category News |
Author: Daisy Dominguez Published: July 5th, 2011
I am glad to announce that all of the finding aids to our most recent collections of Latin American ephemera are now up (they correspond to Supplement VI of the Princeton University Library’s Microfilm Collection). You will find below a list with the title of every collection linked to its corresponding finding aid. Each finding aid includes a general description and an itemized inventory of the contents of the collection. Please note that all of our finding aids can be cross searched using the search interface at http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead/advancedSearch.
You will also note that we included runs of a handful of stand-alone serial titles. Finding aids are not available for those.
In case that it’s of interest, I am attaching a narrative description of the overall collection that I prepared a while ago. All of the collections are available through interlibrary loan or for purchase. Feel free to contact me with any comments or questions.
Latin America
Brazil
- Brazilian Catholic Church pamphlets, III, 1935-1994 [This last one is an older collection which had not been previously distributed. A finding aid isn’t available, but Worldcat record is highly detailed.]
- Jornal dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, 1997-2008
Chile
- El Punto Final, 1998-2008
- El Siglo, 1997-2008
Colombia and Venezuela
Cuba
- El Caimán Barbudo, 1988-2007
- La Tribuna de La Habana, 1988-1989
Mexico and Central America
Peru
Uruguay
Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez
Princeton University
Tags: ephemera, Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, finding aids, institutional news, Princeton University
Category News |
Author: Daisy Dominguez Published: April 14th, 2011
The Manuscripts Division has recently added the manuscripts of Argentinean writer Juan José Saer to its premier collection of archives, manuscripts, and correspondence by Latin American writers and intellectuals. The collection contains numerous notebooks, notes, and drafts of Saer’s novels, essays, short stories, poems, and interviews. Several items in the collection are unpublished. Also included are background materials for Saer’s posthumous novel, La Grande, and some photographs. A detailed finding aid is already available.
Juan José Saer, the son of Syrian immigrants to Argentina, was born in Serodino, a town in the province of Santa Fé, on June 28, 1937. He studied law and philosophy at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fé, and taught film history and criticism at the same institution. He moved to Paris in 1968, where he taught literature at the University of Rennes, and lived in that city until his death in 2005. Although Saer spent most of his literary life outside Argentina, much of his fiction was set on the area of northern Argentina known as el Litoral. Among his literary works are the novels Cicatrices (1968), El limonero real (1974), Nadie, nada, nunca (1980), El entenado (1983), La ocasión (1988), La pesquisa (1994), and the book of poems El arte de narrar (1977). Saer is considered by some critics to be the most important Argentinean writer of the post-Borges generation.
Feel free to contact me or the Manuscripts Division for information additional information about this collection.
Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez
Princeton University
Tags: collections, Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, institutional news, Princeton
Category News |
Author: Adan Griego Published: July 26th, 2010
Some of the very productive discussion that have taken place at SALALM have already been posted by others, but I wanted to share with us all the remarks from SALALM’s president at yesterday’s opening session.
“Good morning, bienvenidos, bemvindo, welcome to the 55th meeting of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM). My name is Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, I am serving this year as President of SALALM, and I am also the Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino Studies at the Princeton University Library.
I want to start by thanking very specially our hosts in Providence, the Brown University Library, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Local arrangements group lead by Patricia Figueroa for making this conference possible and for their amazing generosity and hospitality. It is a pleasure to visit your beautiful campus, its libraries, and the city of Providence.
I also want to offer my special thanks to the Princeton University Library, which was another generous sponsor of this event, and to the vendors that have sponsored the coffee and bagel, ice cream and smoothie breaks that will make our conference a more enjoyable one. They are, in alphabetical order, Gale-Cengage Learning, Iberbook Sánchez Cuesta, Iberoamericana-Editorial Vervuert, Libros Centroamericanos, Puvill Libros, Retta Libros, and Susan Bach Books from Brazil.
I have to admit that in many respects, the theme of this year’s conference, The Future of Latin American Library Collections and Research: Contributing and Adapting to New Trends in Research Libraries, is not really a response to new or recent developments. I say that because many of these developments, at least those having to do with the incorporation of digital technologies into libraries, originated more than two decades ago, and research libraries have been both adapting to and implementing them since then. Latin American Studies and area studies librarians, the collections for which they are responsible, and also scholarly research and teaching in these disciplines, have of course always been a part of this process, even if sometimes from the fringes of the research library world.
On that note, please allow me to read a couple of quotes:
1. “Area studies collections, which had comprised the library vanguard, are perceived as relics of an outdated library philosophy emphasizing ownership over access, and of disciplines somewhere between quaint and archaic in their dependence on print formats.
Scholarly communication in general, as well as for area and LAS, is becoming ever more complex. The evolving process is straining all aspects of the traditional system. For research libraries, reduced buying power and diminished coverage are among the most immediately dramatic results. Our efforts to anticipate, react to, and utilize these changes will become increasingly crucial as we attempt to maintain the information base necessary for our scholars.”
2. “The increased availability of information in digitized format is leading to shifts in research libraries’ acquisitions patterns, reducing the portion of library budgets available for conventionally published materials…
Developing current and future cooperative arrangements among libraries is an important component of the project. The issues include: …delivery mechanisms for full text as well as bibliographic information to scholars throughout North America; and the need to further understanding broadly among librarians and scholars that the physical location of foreign language collections need not limit their utility geographically.
The first quote is from an article titled “Latin American Studies, Information Resources and Library Collections: the contexts of crisis,” by Dan Hazen, from Harvard University who is probably sitting somewhere around here. The second one is from an article by Jeffrey Gardner titled “Scholarship, research libraries and foreign publishing in the 1990s”. Both appeared in the Papers of the 36th Annual Meeting of SALALM, which was cohosted by University of California-San Diego, and San Diego State University, in June of 1991, almost twenty years ago.
So, fundamental concerns, key questions, aren’t new. What is different today is that we apparently are in a juncture where technological capacity and know-how, economic incentives and constraints, as well as personal preferences and biases among the various categories of stakeholders, are truly converging into new dominant models of access and of scholarly communications. The shift has already taken place in many disciplines, in the natural and physical sciences in particular, and is rapidly gaining steam across the social sciences and the humanities.
It truly is time then, as our colleague David Block invited us to do two years ago during the SALALM meeting at New Orleans, through his paper titled “Where are we; Where we may be going, What will we do there?”, to examine what all of these apparently systemic changes mean from the perspective of Latin American Studies, and of other area studies too.
This is essential because the conditions and circumstances that characterize our area of responsibility (the academic field of Latin American Studies, and in a broader sense, the intellectual-creative expression production that originates in the region – two things that aren’t exactly the same) do not, at least in my opinion, always fit well with the new models being implemented. To be sure, major changes in publishing, scholarly communications, and distribution are also taking place across Latin America, of course, but these are not always be related to the same set of circumstances that have driven change across the research libraries that most of us work at.
Some questions for us then are, what can we do to avoid or minimize the possibility of an increasing disconnect, in some areas, between the Latin American reality that we wish to document and to represent, and the systems of collection development and scholarly communication that scholars rely on? Conversely, how do we take better advantage of new technologies and other factors to reduce long existing documentation gaps? How can we achieve this when most Latin American Studies librarians are tremendously overstretched as they have had to undertake an increasingly wider range of duties and subject areas, not to mention the cases where even libraries with venerable Latin American Studies traditions have left vacancies unfilled for prolonged periods of time, leaving us wondering if these are permanent decisions? How do we achieve this when, amid talk of the need to globalize education, Latin American and area studies programs apparently lose weight and presence in many of our campuses and are slotted into generic international categories?
We are not going to answer these questions during the next three days, but I think that the program will help us to examine them, and many other related ones, from a wide variety of perspectives. At a minimum, it will at least help us to be better informed and to learn from each other’s experiences, ideas and strategies. Ideally, it will stimulate us to think about and propose new ways of acting in coordination to successfully adapt to and influence future developments affecting our field. We’ll see. ”
Many thanks to Fernando who endured my many pleas to have his remarks forwarded to me so that I could include them here.
Tags: Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, SALALM55
Category SALALM Blog |
Author: Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez Published: January 26th, 2010
I would like to use this space to tell about some of the discussions that took place in late November during the Fall meeting of the Latin America Northeast Libraries Consortium (LANE), hosted by Angela Carreño of the New York University Libraries. The meeting was noticeably different from previous ones because the group had previously agreed to dedicate most of the time to discussing new models and possibilities for cooperative collection development among the members.
During the day-long discussion, we learned about how small groups of libraries within LANE (Brown and Dartmouth, Columbia and Cornell, and BorrowDirect consortium members, for example) are currently exploring and even starting to implement new models of cooperation. We also took time to map the collecting areas within each institution that have or are likely to be adversely affected by budget cuts. The idea was that by identifying those areas and sharing the information, the consortium would be better prepared to coordinate future decisions about collection development priorities and directions.
We also discussed the impact that electronic books might have on our Latin American and Iberian collections, and how could those fit into new models ofcooperative collection development. It was fascinating to hear how some libraries are beginning to incorporate e-book collections in different ways. Some, for example, are encouraging and financially supporting emerging ventures in this area, hoping that their support will be an incentive for the development of better digital products in the near future. Other libraries are proceeding more cautiously and are concerned about costs aswell as about the effect that the trend might have on the future quality of their collections. Interestingly, what did not seem to be possible to answer at this point in time was whether e-books would represent a replacement or a supplement of print.
Additionally, we learned about the ‘Cloud Library’ pilot project currently being conducted by New York University and OCLC Research. The objective of the project is to explore the cost-effectiveness of sourcing a significant proportion of NYU’s local collection through the combination of large scale digital repositories and off site, shared print repositories. We also heard about the impact that the recent study released by Ithaka S+R, “What to Withdraw? Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization” (available at http://bibpurl.oclc.org/web/37738) ishaving in some libraries.
I describe the nature of these discussions to the broader SALALM community because the topics are tremendously relevant to the 2010 conference theme and I would like to encourage members to propose papers, presentations and/or workshops that relate to them. Something that became immediately apparent during our discussions was that more data and analysis are necessary to implement new cooperative collection development models that can both, sustain future research and teaching, and preserve the scholarly record. If SALALM, through its committees and its individual members can help to generate some of the data and the analysis that is relevant to Latin American Studies scholarship, the organization would possibly be making a very important contribution to the field.
Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez
Princeton University Library
Tags: Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez
Category Messages, SALALM Blog |
Author: Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez Published: November 17th, 2009
>During the last few weeks, I have received several emails and phone calls from SALALM members wishing to discuss their ideas for the Providence 2010 conference program, and also from others who simply wanted to express that they were glad to learn that SALALM would dedicate a whole conference to examining how recent technological and economic trends are transforming the way in which we make available documentation, information, and an important part of the cultural production from Latin America. To those who contacted me, thank you very much for your interest and support.
One of these callers also recommended stating more clearly to the SALALM membership why I think that this is an important and timely topic. I will follow the advice and be very straightforward.
Just as many SALALM members eloquently expressed during the New Orleans and Berlin conferences, I also am concerned about the potentially adverse effects that recent trends will have on the strength of future Latin American research library collections and, consequently, on Latin American Studies scholarship. New technologies, to be sure, do offer fantastic opportunities in the areas of publishing, scholarly communication and access delivery, among others. But the way in which research libraries – often forced by economic circumstances- are implementing new models of acquiring, processing, reformatting and sharing information may unintentionally produce not only negative, but irreparable consequences that will limit the possibilities for future Latin American Studies research.
For example, in one scenario that was discussed during the Berlin conference, research libraries continue to seek badly needed savings by uncritically adopting new acquisitions models that privilege large book distributors, discourage competition, and leave aside the smaller vendors that cannot afford to absorb new costs. The undesired outcome is the crippling of a bibliographic distribution network that SALALM successfully contributed to develop over several decades. With a diminished network, it becomes increasingly difficult and costly, if not impossible, to acquire the noncommercial, nonmainstream, and marginal materials that can only provide a balanced representation of the multiple perspectives, sectors and voices found across Latin American societies. If that scenario becomes a reality, it would represent a major failure on the part of the research libraries. What can and should we, as an organization and as individuals, do about this?
It really is not a matter of resisting change or of sticking to the practices that we know well. It is a matter of first, assessing both the opportunities and the risks presented by those trends, and then advocating for and putting forward the arguments in favor of the practices and strategies that will ensure that research libraries will continue to support Latin American Studies research well into the future. All of this will require increasing levels of collaboration and dialogue within and beyond SALALM. Hopefully, our 2010 meeting in Providence will serve as a broad forum for moving in that direction.
On a different note, as most of you surely know, SALALM isn’t exactly in great financial shape. To generate some savings, the Executive Board recently accepted a recommendation from the Finance Committee requesting that SALALM ceases to contribute matching funds to the Marietta Daniels Shepard Scholarship Fund. As SALALM’s Treasure Jane Garner explained, the scholarship fund has already reached and exceeded the endowment goal. At this moment, what the School of Information at the University of Texas-Austin (http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/) really needs from SALALM is assistance in finding qualified candidates who can make use of the scholarship. The Marietta Daniels Shepard Scholarship Fund’s objective is to support “a student who is committed to fostering the development of libraries in Latin America and the Caribbean by pursuing a professional career in one or more of the countries of Latin America or the Caribbean.” If you know potential candidates who may benefit from the scholarship, please refer them to UT’s School of Information.
Hasta la próxima!
Posted by Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez.
Tags: Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez
Category Messages, SALALM Blog |
Author: Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez Published: September 22nd, 2009
Dear SALALM colleagues,
Especially for those of you who couldn’t make it to Berlin and therefore missed my introduction to the 2010 conference theme, The Future of Latin American Library Collections and Research: Contributing and Adapting to New Trends in Research Libraries (Providence, Rhode Island, July 23-27, 2010), please visit http://dl.lib.brown.edu/salalm/.
You’ll find there more information about the conference theme and additional details, including a pre-conference workshop at the John Carter Brown Library on the history of the book in Mexico. Patricia Figueroa, our host at Brown University and head of the Local Arrangements Committee, will send more information about the workshop in the near future.
As you will notice, the SALALM 2010 conference will depart from the usual practice of organizing the theme around an academic topic or discipline. Instead, the meeting will serve as a broad forum for examining, debating and learning about technical and theoretical aspects related to the complex trends that are transforming the way in which Latin American research library collections are developed and the manner in which research libraries provide access to the region’s documentation.
The objective is to bring to the next level an essential conversation that was initiated in 2008 at Tulane University by David Block’s presentation of his paper Where Are We?; Where We May Be Going; What Will We Do There (available at http://hdl.handle.net/1813/10827). Ultimately, I hope that 2010 conference serves to foster the development of ideas and strategies that can be adopted by SALALM, its members, and other important stakeholder in order to both adapt to trends and shape outcomes.
To achieve this, I am asking SALALM committee chairs in particular and the membership in general to start considering and preparing substantial contributions for the program in the form of panels, roundtable discussions and workshops. As you do this, keep in mind that this is an excellent opportunity for producing high quality papers that might serve as documentation or reference for the broader library world. This is also a good opportunity to rethink and refocus, if appropriate, the work conducted within committees.
Even though an official press release and a call for papers have not been sent out yet, feel free to contact me to discuss preliminary ideas and potential proposals. I am looking forward to hear from many of you.
Muchas gracias y hasta pronto.
Posted by Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez
Tags: Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, Providence, SALALM55
Category SALALM Blog |
