¿Libros en español? İDígame!

Smithsonian Libraries to Digitize and Convert Spanish Language Publications for e-Readers

A May 2011 Pew Internet and American Life study showed that 15% of American Latino adults own an e-Reader, the highest percentage of any ethnic group they surveyed.  Now, while some of those surveyed probably read English, Japanese, and Arabic…it’s also possible a few of them also read Spanish.

Coincidentally, and happily, this year the Libraries has received funding from the SI Latino Center to analyze our Spanish language holdings and create an online collection of public domain Spanish language works.

To create this collection, we have hired our first ever virtual intern, Cynthia Orozco who will be helping us analyze our collection, look at related titles already digitized, and create a list of seed titles for our new online collection.  Some titles will be digitized from items in our physical collections, and all will be converted to ePub format for reading on mobile devices such as kindle, ipad and Nook.

Cynthia is only with us for a month, and she can’t do it all alone – so we want your input!  Is there a Spanish language publication that has been important to your scholarship?  Is there a facet of Latino studies, History, or Culture that you know is underrepresented on the Web, but is represented in our physical collections? Let us know and we will investigate the possibilities for inclusion in this project – if you’d like, search for your title in our catalog to see if we have it.

We may not be able to satisfy all requests, but we are happy to try.  Because we want to make this collection freely accessible we are only looking for titles in the public domain, which generally means published before 1923 (but leave the legal niceties to us.)

Let us know in the comments section if you have a title or subject you would like to see in ePub format, and please check our blog in the next few months for more updates from the Latino ePublications and Digitization project.

If you prefer not to comment, feel free to send us a direct tweet (@silibraries) or email Erin Thomas thomase[at]si[dot]edu