SALALM in the Age of Multimedia : Technological Challenge and Social
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SALALM in the Age of Multimedia: Technological Challenge and Social Change SEMINAR ON THE ACQUISITION OF LATIN AMERICAN LIBRARY MATERIALS XLI HAROLD B. LbE LIBRARY BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSE PKOVO, UTAH SALALM in the Age of Multimedia SALALM Secretariat Benson Latin American Collection The General Libraries The University of Texas at Austin SALALM in the Age of Multimedia: Technological Challenge and Social Change Papers of the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the SEMINAR ON THE ACQUISITION OF LATIN AMERICAN LIBRARY MATERIALS New York University New York Public Library NYU/Columbia Consortium for Latin American Studies June 1-5, 1996 Peter A. Stern, Editor SALALM Secretariat Benson Latin American Collection The General Libraries The University of Texas at Austin ISBN: 0-917617-58-4 Copyright © 1998 by SALALM, Inc. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America HAROLD B. Lbb LIBRARY 8RJGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY — PflOVO, UTAH 11 Contents Preface IX Acknowledgments xi I. Media and Politics 1. The Internet, the Global Commercial Communication Revolution, and the Democratic Prospect Robert W. McChesney 2. Internetworking as a Tool for Advocacy and Research: The Case of Chiapas News, 1994-1996 Molly Molloy 12 3. Native Americans and Information Technology: Connection and Community Michele M. Reid and Susan Shaw 24 4. Providing Instruction on the Research Use of the Internet for Political Science and Human Rights Studies Sarah Landeryou 3 II. Media and the Arts 5. Collective Memory of a Continent: The Theater of Latin America Louis A. Rachow 37 6. The Boom Wasn't Just Novels: Audiovisual Archives and Modern Latin American Culture Jerry W. Carlson 40 7. Latin American Cinema Resources on the Internet Gayle Ann Williams 46 8. Making Connections: A Centralized, Online Resource of Latin American and Latino Film and Video Karen Ranucci 5 vi Contents III. Media and Bibliography 9. The Orthodox Method of Creating the Gabriel García Márquez Bibliography Nelly S. Gonzalez 55 10. La preparación de bibliografías electrónicas Luis M. Villar 65 IV. Media and Conservation 11. Ochenta años de historia en imágenes: la digitalización del periódico El Mundo Víctor F. Torres-Ortiz 81 12. Project Open Book and Preservation in the Digital World Paul Conway 86 13. Sight and Sound: Hispanic Audiovisual Archives in the Cybernetic Age Georgette M. Dorn 92 14. The Latin Americanist Research Resources Pilot Project: A Distributed Model of Library Cooperation Deborah Jakubs 100 V. Media and Technical Services 15. Uso de OCLC-EPIC para identificar patrones de colección de material audiovisual sobre América Latina Ketty Rodríguez 107 16. Latin American Websites for Catalogers and Technical Services Librarians Barbara Stewart 115 17. An Integrated System for Cataloging in the Field of Jurisprudence at the Ibero-American Institute Markus Obert 127 Contents vü VI. Media and Education 18. Uso del Internet dentro de las bibliotecas latinoamericanas Filiberto F Martínez Arellano 133 19. As tecnologias da comunicação e a educação escolar Leila Maria Ferreira Salles and Débora Mazza 151 VI. Media in Latin America and the Caribbean 20. El potencial del Internet como fuente de información en América Latina Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla 163 21. La divulgación del conocimiento en las universidades públicas mexicanas: la distribución de sus publicaciones Jesús Lau and Jesús Cortés 178 22. Estrategias y políticas de información y tecnología: el futuro deseable Saadia Sánchez Vegas 198 23. More Programs, Fewer Voices: Caribbean Television in the Global Era Elizabeth Mahan and Adolfo Vargas 210 Contributors 221 Conference Program 223 Preface The Forty-First Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials took place in a time of extraordinary excitement and uncertainty in the library world. The old, familiar "bi-polar" world of books and serials has given way to a complicated universe of multimedia resources, including the World Wide Web, compact disks, electronic databases (bibliographic and full-text), videos, graphic and text files, microforms, and so on. Along with the multiplication of media has come an accelerating trend toward the "virtual library," where resources are ac- cessed from thousands of miles away and no longer need be physically present in the library building (along with equally remote library users!). Along with swift technological change has come economic and social turmoil. The old "technology gap" between First and Third Worlds has narrowed to near-invisibility; Latin American societies have taken full advantage of new information technologies to leapfrog the old bottlenecks of time and space that separated the Northern from the Southern Hemispheres. But along with excit- ing technological developments have come doubt and confusion. Library bud- gets, which have long struggled to keep up with old-fashioned monograph and serial inflation, have been assaulted with new demands to accommodate emerg- ing information technologies and formats. The economics of the new informa- tion age are far from certain; in an era of free-market economics, government "downsizing," and shrinking support for public education, the issue of free and equal access to information is very much in question. Most of the essays in this volume are concerned with the new informa- tion environment which is coming into being as we near the next millennium. From the use of the Internet by the have-nots of society to the digitalization of deteriorating research materials, participants in SALALM XLI have struggled to conceptualize and frame answers to the complex questions which new tech- nologies have engendered. The essays in this volume, however, do not capture the full range of activities from the sessions. José Soriano of the Red Científica Peruana described how his organization is bringing Internet access to ordinary people in Peru, who may not even own a telephone. There were panels on CDs and multimedia in Latin America, a demonstration by the Archivo General de Indias in Seville of developments in digitalization of the Archivo' s extraordi- nary resources on colonial Latin America, a panel on ongoing digitalization IX x Preface projects of Caribbean newspapers and Brazilian documents, panels on effective bibliographic instruction in the age of multimedia, the "virtual library" in theory and practice, and many other topics. What they all had in common was one overriding theme: that technology does not exist in a vacuum. It is always rooted in a social context, and its im- pact on our society will always bring unexpected benefits and problems. To close the "user-information gap," or more prosaically, to put a human face on the gad- getry, will increasingly be the challenge for librarians in the dawning age of multimedia. Peter A. Stern s Acknowledgments I would first like to thank the Local Arrangements Committee, especially Angela Carreño and Denise Hibay, chair and assistant chair respectively, as well as Laurence Hallewell and Ramón Abad, who bore the brunt of the work in mak- ing sure that the forty-first meeting of SALALM in "the Big Apple" would be simulating, informative and, above all, fun. Mich Nelson, although only a li- brary school student at the time, attended the planning meetings and pitched in tirelessly, as did Dror Faust, Judith Selakoff, Carmen Diaz, Laurie Yorr, Celia Cyrille, Bridget Wentworth, Ann Snoeyenbos, Lilia Vasquez, and a host of vol- unteers and student workers. Our New York meeting was truly a consortial gathering, with New York University, Columbia University, and The New York Public Library working together to provide facilities for hosting the meeting. I am especially grateful to the Reed Foundation, Puvill Libros, and the Instituto Cervantes for their gen- erous support for panels and receptions. Laura Gutiérrez-Witt, SALALM' Executive Secretary, was a constant source of advice and help on the difficul- ties of planning and executing a large and complex meeting. Personally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the people who helped proofread and format the papers, particularly Michael Foldy, Lori Mestre, Daphne Patai, and Stas Radosh, as well as Pat Graves and the students who helped retype especially recalcitrant papers. Of course, no SALALM papers would ever see the light of day without the hard work and patience of Barbara Valk, who has steered publications through many rocky reefs over the years and continues to demand (and get) the highest quality work from the Seminar's contributors. XI I. Media and Politics 1 . The Internet, the Global Commercial Communication Revolution, and the Democratic Prospect Robert W. McChesney The current period is one of intense turmoil across the globe. On the one hand, capitalism reigns triumphant in a manner unknown for most of the century, if ever. This new era of capitalism is characterized by some as neoliberalism, referring to the acceptance of the market and profit maximization as the best regulators of human affairs. It is also characterized as globalization, referring to the manner by which the market economy is evolving from a national to a transnational foundation. There is no small amount of debate about the ex- tent of globalization and its effects, but there is no question that many key firms and markets now operate globally or regionally rather than nationally. On the other hand, formal democracy now extends to a greater percentage of the human race than ever before. The key word, of course, is formal, because many of these democracies are quite corrupt and ineffectual. And even the purported guiding light of capitalist democracy, the United States, is a remark- ably antidemocratic society, as its political process is typified by rampant depoliticization, minimal public awareness or debate, and open rule by powerful moneyed interests. That capitalism and democracy are not synonymous should hardly be a sur- prise. Capitalism, even under the best of circumstances, is always a class society and democracy is most effective when there is limited class inequality. Democ- racy also works best when there exists a democratic spirit, a notion that an individual's welfare is directly and closely attached to the welfare of the commu- nity, however large community may be defined.