Mellon Continues Support for Latin American Project

	The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has made a generous grant of
$125,000 to ARL for the second phase of the Latin Americanist Research
Resources Pilot Project.  Begun in 1994 with Mellon support, the
project's overall goals are to broaden the array of Latin Americanist
resources available to students and scholars, to restructure access to
these collections on a comprehensive scale, and to assist libraries in
containing costs.  Originally envisioned as a pilot endeavor of twenty
libraries, the project expanded rapidly during its first phase to
include thirty-two ARL institutions.  These libraries have jointly
designed an organizational structure and implemented a system of
coordinated collection management that utilizes advanced communication
technologies to deliver Latin Americanist research materials,
especially those that may be difficult to acquire.  The most
significant project accomplishment to date is an easily accessible
Internet database that offers students and scholars the tables of
contents of 300 academic journals from Argentina and Mexico that are
not widely indexed.  In addition, participating libraries have assumed
collecting responsibilities for publications of non-governmental
organizations from the two countries.

Phase two of the project will be completed between November 1995 and
December 1996.  An evaluation of the costs and benefits of the first
phase will be completed, the cooperative collecting assignments will
be refined and expanded, and efforts will be made to build
partnerships with Latin American institutions.  Mark Grover, Brigham
Young University, will continue as Project Coordinator on a half-time
basis.

The most important part of the second phase, however, will be to take
a step toward full implementation of the distributed model that is the
overall goal of ARL's global initiatives by analyzing the effect that
such a model will have on the internal structure of libraries.  Five
"case study" libraries will address management, staffing, and economic
issues, and will determine the intra-institutional and inter-
institutional changes needed to realize the full benefits of sharing
Latin Americanist research resources, in particular the potential cost
savings.  The ARL institutions that will pursue this analysis within a
collaborative framework are the University of California at Berkeley,
the University of Florida, Stanford University, the University of
Texas, and Yale University.  This stage of the project will also focus
on the development of models for subsequent cooperative endeavors
within the emerging networked environment.

- Jutta Reed-Scott, ARL Senior Program Officer for Preservation and
Collection Services

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ARL 183
A Bimonthly Newsletter of Research Library Issues and Actions
Association of Research Libraries
December 1995