U of New Mexico launches harvester and OA repository for Latin American culture

Harvesting Knowledge in the Americas, a press release from University of New Mexico, December 7, 2006.  Excerpt:

Not long ago scholars wanting to conduct in depth research about indigenous cultures in Latin America, for example, would have to travel to the region and visit different libraries and repositories. Maybe the researcher would be lucky enough to find needed documents, photos, books and resources critical to his research. But maybe the materials couldn't be located, were unavailable or the library was closed. The days of time-consuming, expensive research in Latin American topics may soon be over, thanks to the Latin America Knowledge Harvester and Portal (LAKH).

The Harvester for Creating Knowledge Streams in the Americas Project, coordinated by UNM's Latin American and Iberian Institute, addresses the challenge of identifying and maintaining stable and reliable Internet access to library and institutional collections and digitized archives in and about Latin America....

Cynthia Radding, director, Latin American and Iberian Institute, and Johann van Reenen, assistant dean, University Libraries, are co-PIs on the grant.

The idea for the harvester came from the Open Archives Initiative established in Santa Fe in 1999....

"The intent of the grant is to find new avenues of access to foreign information, preferably in translation and in a digital format," van Reenen said. He added that the biggest challenge of the pilot project is creating a trilingual search engine and organizing the streams of information in the portal....

He said that LAKH allows for "harvesting" data from any intellectual asset that meets the standard anywhere in the world. By harvesting meta-data, information can be drawn from seemingly unalike repositories. "It will create easy interdisciplinary research. Essentially, it will allow users to mine information from sources not even thought about before," he said.

LAKH resides at UNM as part of the institutional repository....