Nicholas Cop is the Founder and President of Nicholas Cop Consulting, LLC which he established in 2005. The company, based in Florida, provides information and education consulting services to universities, publishers, and academic and research library networks at the national and regional levels, primarily in Latin America. It also provides translation services of scholarly and technical texts in Spanish and Portuguese into English.
Nicholas was the founding director of OCLC’s Sales and Marketing Division for Latin America and the Caribbean (1995-2005). In addition to the various assignments the company undertakes, Nicholas is the international consultant to the SciELO e-journal and eBook initiatives, and was a member of the first Redalyc Advisory Board.
A graduate in physics (B.Sc.) from McMaster University, Canada, with postgraduate studies undertaken at the University of Toronto, Canada, Nicholas is fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese with a working knowledge of French and Slovenian.
Talía Guzmán-González is a second-year MLS student in the iSchool at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). She holds a PhD in Brazilian Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and an MA from Indiana University- Bloomington. Prior to pursuing the MLS, she taught Portuguese language, Luso-Brazilian literature, and Latin American Studies at UMCP. Talía wants to combine her studies in MLS with her teaching and research experience and pursue career in an academic library or cultural heritage institution. She is interested in area studies related to Latin America, international librarianship, and digital humanities.
Julianne Gilland is Associate Director for Scholarly Resources at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and Special Collections Curator for the Benson Latin American Collection. Before joining the Benson in 2013, she served as Deputy Director of the Robbins Collection at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Julianne received her Ph.D. in history from Berkeley in 2002, where she specialized in early modern Spain and Spanish America.
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Jason Kauffman is a PhD candidate in Latin American history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently completing his dissertation, a social and environmental history of the Pantanal wetlands of rural Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. He enjoys digging through old documents in the archives and tracking down obscure books. He also has a growing interest in the digital and environmental humanities. Before moving to North Carolina he earned a M.A. in Latin American History from the University of New Mexico and a B.A. in History from Goshen College in Indiana.
Cate Kellett is the Catalog and Government Documents Librarian at Yale Law School. She helps select Latin American and Iberian titles and performs original cataloging on most foreign language materials acquired by the law library. Cate received her JD/MLS from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, MA in Spanish Linguistics from SUNY Albany, and BA from Cornell University.
SALALM Fall 2014 Scholarship awardees
Laura Geiken is a dual degree student at Indiana University, pursuing a Master’s in Library Science and a Master’s of Art in Latin American Studies. Additionally, she is an Associate Spanish Instructor at IU in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She has also worked as a Subject Specialist Assistant for the Latin American Studies Librarian at the Herman B Wells Library at IU. Before beginning graduate school, Laura served in the Peace Corps for three years on an indigenous reservation in Panama. In the Peace Corps, Laura worked on HIV/AIDS prevention projects and youth development.
During her time at IU, Laura has researched numerous topics related to the Americas. Much of her research has focused on Latin American migration patterns, questions of citizenship, and also the plight of undocumented students with regards to higher education in the United States. She has also explored issues of information access and outreach for minority populations in the U.S., particularly the Latin American diaspora. Furthermore, this past summer Laura investigated the public library system in Panama in relation to the closure of university library science programs.
In the future, Laura plans to work as a subject specialist with Latin American and Latino collections in a university setting. She also hopes to support first-generation college students through training and information literacy initiatives.
Taylor Leigh is currently completing a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at Brown University and a Masters in Library and Information Science at the University of Rhode Island. Taylor wrote his MA thesis on authorial ideology in the Poema de Mio Cid and maintains an interest in medieval peninsular literary traditions. Currently, his dissertation work for the Ph.D. focuses on George Ticknor (1791-1871), first Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, founder of the Boston Public Library, and premier hispanist in the United States. The broad goal of the project is to highlight Ticknor’s importance to both hispanists and librarians working with Hispanic materials by detailing Ticknor’s crucial role in fostering the study of Hispanic culture in the United States and promoting the growth of libraries.
Taylor has had significant library work experience over the course of the last few years. In the summer of 2011, he was hired by the Department of Hispanic Studies to reorganize the department’s internal library. The following summer, Taylor worked as an archival assistant under Karen Eberhart, Manuscripts Processing Archivist, Brown University Special Collections, on the Jose Rodrigues Miguéis Collection, a diverse assortment of the late Portuguese-American writer’s manuscripts, correspondence, journals, photographs, and miscellanea.
During the summer of 2014, Taylor worked on collection development projects with Patricia Figueroa, Curator of Iberian and Latin American Collections at Brown University. He conducted a comprehensive review of the library’s holdings of texts included on the Department of Hispanic Studies’ Preliminary Examination List to ensure student and faculty access to serviceable editions. He also identified gaps in the library’s Hispanic Studies collection by working with faculty members and consulting literary histories, encyclopedias, and bibliographies.
In addition to Taylor’s academic and library experience, he has also worked as a translator, interpreter, and Spanish instructor. In 2014, he translated the Guantánamo Public Memory exhibit, “Bringing Guantánamo Home,” for the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. He has five years experience as a Spanish language instructor at the college level, as well as two years’ experience teaching intermediate medical Spanish for the Alpert Medical School at Brown.
Taylor has lived, studied, and worked in Spain and Argentina, and has traveled extensively in those countries, as well as Chile and Uruguay. In the future, Taylor plans to look for subject specialist librarian or archivist positions that allow him to utilize his knowledge of the Hispanic world in conjunction with his library skills.
SALALMISTAS in the news
Antonio Sotomayor, a Assistant Professor and Librarian for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign just published a chapter on the relationship between sports and politics in Puerto Rico. “The Cold War Games of a Colonial Latin American Nation: San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1966.” In Andrew Johns and Heather Dietcher, editors, Diplomatic Games: Sport, Statecraft, and International Relations since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014, 217-249. The publication can be accessed on Google Books.
Former SALALM president and Librarian Emerita from the University of Texas, Ann Hartness recently published a reference book titled Brasil: obras de referência, 1999-2013. This annotated bibliography follows the previous publication of Brasil: obras de referência, 1965-1998 also published by Briquet de Lemos Livros. you can find more information about this title here.
Paloma Celis Carbajal, SALALM president elect, Jesus Alonso-Regalado, University at Albany and Alison Hicks, University of Colorado at Boulder, Ann Barnhart, University of West Georgia will present at the Asociación Mexicana de Bibliotecarios, A.C. (AMBAC) during the meeting that takes place at the Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, Mexico.
Fall 2014 Newsmakers
Meagan Lacy, Information Literacy Librarian at Guttman Community College at The City University of New York, is the author and editor of The Slow Book Revolution: Creating a New Culture of Reading on College Campuses and Beyond (ABC-CLIO, 2014). Go here to read the full press release.
Melissa Gasparotto, Latin American, African, Latino, Spanish and Portuguese Studies Liaison at Rutgers University, recently published a paper title “A ten year analysis of dissertation bibliographies from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University”. You can access the paper through the repository at Rutgers University.
The City College of New York reference librarian, Daisy Dominguez also published an article in the journal Collection Building titled “American Indians in feature films: beyond the big Screen”. You access the article here.
The article “Deciding on Databases: Strategies for Selecting in Latin American and Spanish Language Studies ” was published by Holly Ackerman, Librarian for Latin American, Iberian, & Latino Studies at Duke University in The Charleston Advisor. Click here to access the publication.
Book artist, Luis Delgado recently published on Malulu editions a book of photography and verse Le canto por un pan/ I sing for bread. You can ready more about the publication of this book as well as information on his other works here.
American Reads Spanish interviewed Adan Griego, the curator for Iberoamerican & Mexican American Collections at Stanford University about publishers in the US library market. To read the full interview click here.
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Julienne Grant is Reference Librarian/Foreign & International Research Specialist at the Loyola University Chicago Law Library. She is also adjunct faculty at Loyola where she teaches an advanced course on foreign, comparative, and international legal research. She is currently the Chair of the American Association of Law Libraries’ Latin American Law Interest Group. Julienne received a B.A. in Spanish from Middlebury College, an M.A. in Ibero-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.A.L.S. from Rosary College, and a J.D. from DePaul University.
Ana Ramirez Luhrs is a Research & Instruction Librarian at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. She is subject liaison to the Government and Law, International Affairs and Spanish departments, and a member of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) program committee. As the collection developer for LACS, she works closely with faculty to build the library’s Latin American collection across all fields of study. She also serves as the faculty adviser to the student group, Hispanic Society of Lafayette.
Ashley Larson is an MLIS student at UCLA specializing in library studies. She recently earned her MA in Latin American Studies from Vanderbilt University and holds a BA from Cal State Fullerton. Ashley is also vice-president of the UCLA Special Libraries
Association student chapter and plans to work at the Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) during the 2014 – 2015 academic year. She has research interests in early twentieth-century Brazilian identity, with a focus on gastronomic nationalism.
David Block Retires
David has been a friend and colleague for most all of our respective careers. His active involvement with Latin America started when he volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps in Bolivia. I recently read several of Vanderbilt’s Peace Corps papers belonging to a psychologist who was then the director of Peace Corps selection. He characterizes the early Peace Corps volunteers in these terms: “they are learners, are reaching-out type people, intellectually adventuresome, have a desire to serve tempered with a love of fun and adventure, idealistic but with a realistic appraisal of what they will be up against, and an appropriate modesty; they want to make a contribution to their fellow-man… and they get substantial satisfactions from association with new friends in other lands.” Those traits, along with his PhD and scholarship on Bolivia, seem a match made in heaven for David’s future career in Latin American librarianship and for his SALALM colleagues who have benefitted from all these talents.
He has been a mentor to countless “SALALMis.” He has gently, quietly guided all of us in many ways: introducing us to his wide network of contacts and colleagues in Latin America, especially in the Andean region; sharing his expertise on book buying trips and leading LAMP preservation efforts—and who else has brought Pisco sours to those long meetings? And, all along the way, he has prodded us to try to think and act in a more cooperative and sharing way. Besides serving as president of SALALM, and several terms on the Executive Board, he hosted the annual conference at Cornell. More importantly, he has helped reframe the vision of his member colleagues and encouraged our organization to move in new directions. Since we can no longer “have it all”, even at the Library of Congress or the Benson, he has led us toward increasingly collaborative collections efforts in the US, and has aided Latin American libraries in the preservation and digitization of their own archives. A more recent personal goal involved helping the national library of Peru replace their stolen rare materials. David is a giver, charitable, kind and smart, with a wry sense of humor and great curiosity. He seems equally at home with (and actively seeks the opinions of) taxi drivers, rural indigenous, and urban academics. The development of the Andean collections at Cornell and Latin American collection at the Benson reflect his wide network beyond the standard publishing world to incorporate ephemera, NGO output, organizations small and large, uncommon materials in a wide range of resources that mirror that time and place in Latin America. In his travels he has made many friends and colleagues both in Latin America and the US. We will miss his leadership and expertise but hope our friendships long continue.
Paula Covington
Summer 2014 newsmaker
Peter Altekrüger, library director and deputy director of the Ibero-American Institute just published an edited monograph on Argentinian theater journals and short novels, De amor, crimen y cotidianidad. Las revistas teatrales y colecciones de novelas cortas argentinas del Instituto Ibero-Americano. More details on the publication here.
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Luisa Escobar is the new Library Coordinator at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) in Antigua, Guatemala. Before coming to CIRMA, she worked as the director of the Colección Virginia B. Shook at the Unviersidad del Valle in Guatemala City. From 2000 to 2013, she inventoried, digitized and worked in conserving the Edwin M. Shook archive. She also worked with the Marion Popenoe de Hatch and Juan Pedro Laporte archives.
Luisa is an archaeologist (MA from university of Miami) and has directed different projects in South Coast, Petén and Altiplano of Guatemala.
Sara Stigberg is the Art Collection Public Services Librarian at Northwestern University Library. She received her MLIS from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her MA in Art History from Tulane University, where she focused on Latin American colonial art. A particular interest is mural painting in Mexico, especially from the 16th and 17th centuries. Current projects include expanding the holdings in Latin American art and art history at Northwestern University Library.