Belatedly, we post our final check-in in with our intrepid remote intern, Cynthia Orozco, who writes:
“For the past four weeks, I have had the pleasure of working with the Smithsonian Libraries in analyzing its Spanish language holdings and creating a prioritized list of Spanish language titles for potential digitization. In the first week of my internship, I searched the Smithsonian’s online catalog for Spanish language titles with a publication date before 1923 to search for out-of-copyright materials. In the initial analysis, I found a strong Anthropology collection in Spanish, especially in relation to indigenous languages and archaeology. I then checked the holdings of the Smithsonian’s Spanish language titles in WorldCat to determine how many other libraries carried these titles. Titles that were likely to be digitized by another library or that had already been digitized were omitted from the final list. The titles included in the final list represent works that are only found in 25 libraries or less across the United States. The most unique titles are prioritized at the top of the final list, many of which are only found at the Smithsonian. In addition to works found in the Anthropology Collection, the final list features out-of-copyright literature and selections from the Botany and Entomology collections. Additionally, supplementary materials from Internet Archive were included to provide a more comprehensive digital collection of indigenous language materials written in Spanish.
While my time with the Smithsonian is up, the Latino ePublications and Digitization project has only just begun and we greatly value your input in building this collection! Is there is a particular Spanish language publication or subject area that is important to your scholarship? We are focusing on titles in the public domain, which generally means those titles published before 1923. If you are interested in searching our current collections, search the Smithsonian’s catalog by using a combined search to limit titles by publication date and language to see if we have it. .”
We enjoyed working with Cynthia and appreciate all of her work putting together a collection for us. Please stop by our blog in the next few months as we will be post with links to download the actual e-pubs . Though her part of our project is over, we hope that we will be able to continue to digitize and publish more public-domain works in Spanish in the coming year. Please keep sending us suggestions (though remember, we can only work with titles that are published in the U.S. before 1923, and copyright for works published in other countries may be more restrictive, so let us determine if it can be scanned or not!)
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