EBSCO, in its efforts to expand its digital holdings of primary historical texts, has partnered with the noted Arte Público Press to offer a unique collection of books, broadsides, pamphlets, periodical and newspaper articles, manuscripts and other archival materials recording the literature, political life, and culture of Hispanics in the US from the earliest days of colonization to 1960. The digital collection is based on the texts gathered by Arte Público Press founder Dr Nicolás Kanellos as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage project to preserve significant records of Hispanic past. Growing out of the C Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s, the Houston‐based Arte Público Press began as a publisher of Chicano and other Hispanic literary works and in 1992 began collecting, indexing, and publishing historical material related to the Latino peoples and cultures on American soil. The collection includes unique literary works, memoirs, travelogues, historical accounts of wars and the transfer of lands from Mexico to the US, early Spanish‐language newspapers, sources on the Puerto Rican and other Latin American migration, and many other topic areas. EBSCO now has begun to make those texts available to a larger scholarly audience by embarking upon a large‐scale digitization programme and providing the scanned works as a database for one‐time purchase. Currently over 1,000 books in many subject areas, 60,000 articles, and many political, religious, and other tracts have been scanned and are now fully searchable in the Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1. Approximately 80 percent of the collection is in Spanish, and the publisher's bilingual indexing makes even the most ephemeral items easily retrievable. This digital collection with its wide array of historical documents will greatly appeal to all those who seek a greater understanding of the Latino and Hispanic cultural presence in the US.
The collection utilizes the EBSCOhost search platform for easy, rather intuitive searching. Users can search either in English or Spanish, and can switch between Basic and Advanced Search modes, or try a more graphical interface with EBSCO's Visual Search. The database accepts both English and Spanish keywords, though there are more English metadata terms, so using terms in both languages with an “or” operator can bring up more results. Users can also search by document type for broader categories found in non‐historical databases such as “article” or “book”, and by publication type for more specific formats specific to this collection (“pamphlets”, “broadsides”, etc., all different forms of the document type “book”). There are also geographical terms, subject terms (EBSCO's standard descriptors) and author‐supplied keywords from Arte Público's own indexing terms. The results list and results pages display pertinent information for the researcher. Images or illustrations are displayed as expandable thumbnails on the results page along with a bilingual abstract.
The texts themselves are displayed in the EBSCOhost Content Viewer, its own tool for viewing content from its historical digital archives databases. The Content Viewer features a page map for oversized pages as well as document map of thumbnails for the user to navigate from page to page in the text. An issue tree allows users to jump to different years in a periodical or newspaper. The viewer has its own toolbar with a sliding control adjusts the magnification of the document images and with buttons to create PDFs of the pages to save, print, or e‐mail. Users can also keyword search document text and use the note‐taking feature to annotate saved texts in the My EBSCOhost folder. The scanned images from this collection are clean and do not have some of the legibility problems of early texts in other historical database products. Even novice users can easily master the operation of the viewer after a few attempts, and there are help screens for assistance.
The Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection is not an inexpensive product, though the price is adjusted based on institution size. Nevertheless, research libraries needing primary sources on Latino or Latin American history and culture in general will find the unique material in this collection a valuable asset to scholars and students. The impressive assortment of rare print and manuscript sources in Arte Público make it a rich but also very usable archive of the Hispanic experience in American history.
