With growing interest in Latino and Chicano literary studies in the USA, access to works has often been difficult for researchers and students. Many pieces are published by small presses or are unpublished, sometimes only existing as tape recordings or transcripts. Latino Literature (LALI) from Alexander Street Press seeks to make the primarily Spanish‐language poetry, drama, and fiction of Chicano, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and other Hispanic‐American writers in the USA more widely available by packaging them in a searchable database of literary works, ephemera, and other resources. Like other products from Alexander Street, LALI combines rigorous editorial standards governing the selection of its content with a sophisticated search engine that provides many points of access to users. As of August 2004 the database contains 48 full plays and 13,000 pages of prose and poetry. When completed it is projected to have 450 plays and 120,000 pages of literary text, which will make it a truly comprehensive source for scholarship on US Latino Literature, as well as Latino culture and history.
The unique content chosen for LALI is what makes it such a powerful tool. Isabel Lacerda, the editor of LALI, has collected many works by Chicano and other Hispanic‐American writers from the nineteenth century and the heyday of the Chicano Renaissance to the present in order to make the database representative of the Hispanic‐American literary experience. An editorial board made up of several noted experts in Chicano and US Spanish‐language literature advises Alexander Street in the selection process. Their expertise ranges from US and Chicano theatre to the literature and culture of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and other Latino groups in the USA. They consulted standard bibliographies such as volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography devoted to Chicano Literature and other scholarly sources.
The database also contains many ephemeral works such as never before transcribed tapes of the famous Teatro Campesino that would be an invaluable resource for those studying both the development of Chicano literature and the Chicano labour movement in California. Other texts come from archival collections such as the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College and many from the unpublished manuscripts of authors themselves. Among some of the fascinating unpublished materials included in LALI are some previously unknown poems by the noted Puerto Rican journalist Jesús Colón. LALI also offers a wealth of digitized materials such as playbills, dust jackets, pictures, manuscripts, and other ephemera that shed light on the social context of the literary works. These items would otherwise be lost to researchers and the inclusion of these and the myriad other unpublished documents adds to the value of the database.
LALI not only offers a valuable compendium of texts and other materials, but also gives researchers many points of access to its content through its powerful search engine and semantic indexing. Like several Alexander Street products, the search engine for LALI is based on the PhiloLogic software created at the University of Chicago. This sophisticated search engine enables both in‐depth browsing and complex full‐text searching. Users can browse by authors, by genre (all works, plays, fiction, poems, and other resources), or by other categories such as theatrical companies, productions, characters, and even scenes. The full‐text searching includes a wide array of different indexing terms that even include subject descriptors for topics in social and ethnic studies. Such detailed indexing enables researchers to perform sophisticated searches that would be impossible in many other primary text databases.
As LALI grows with the addition of new plays and other works, it will become an essential tool for libraries supporting advanced study in the areas of Chicano literature and studies, as well as foreign language programmes focusing on Spanish‐language works in the US. This database opens up a world that is otherwise inaccessible to most scholars and students. The high percentage of original content in LALI makes it a worthwhile purchase for libraries seeking to expand their holdings in this field. The high quality of this product makes it a model for other full‐text databases seeking to provide more than just digitized reproductions of sources that already exist in print on library shelves.
