Digital Resources: LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, University of Texas at Austin
Authors: Norsworthy Kent 
Published: November 2018

LLILAS Benson maintains one of the world’s largest collections of digital assets designed to support Latin American studies. These vast digital holdings, all of which reside on open-source platforms and are freely available to a global audience via the Internet, trace their roots back to the early 1990s, before the advent of the World Wide Web. Since that time, LLILAS Benson has forged partnerships with a broad array of researchers and content producers throughout the Americas in order to bring vital Latin American studies content online while at the same time helping to build local capacity in areas such as digitization, metadata, and preservation throughout the region. These digital collections include materials useful to scholars in a broad array of disciplines, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.

One of the main strengths of the collections is in the area of archival and historical sources, with extensive digitized materials spanning more than five centuries and all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The digital collections are particularly strong in terms of Mexican history. Major holdings in the digital collections that include material of interest to those conducting historical research are the following:

• PLA—The Primeros Libros de las Américas project brings together twenty-one libraries and archives in a collaborative initiative that seeks to digitize all surviving copies of books printed in the New World prior to 1601.

• AHPN—The Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional contains more than twelve million pages of digitized Guatemalan police records from the late 19th century through 1996.

• AILLA—The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America is a digital archive of recordings and texts in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America.

• Archivo de Lucas Alamán is a digital archive of more than 350 manuscripts from the personal papers of this influential Mexican statesman. The papers cover the period 1589–1853.

• Archivo de José María Luis Mora—This digital archive contains scanned copies of more than 600 documents, both manuscripts and printed works from the first half of the 19th century, as well as an exhaustive guide describing the collections.

• LANIC—The Latin American Network Information Center is a collection of subject- and country-based resource guides containing more than ten thousand links to Web-based Latin American studies content.

• HRDI—The Human Rights Documentation Initiative is committed to the long-term preservation of fragile and vulnerable records of human rights struggles worldwide and includes important partnerships in Latin America.

• Web archives that are of use to historians include the Latin American Government Documents Archive, or LAGDA, which contains copies of the Websites of more than 250 governmental ministries since 2005, and a collection of human rights–related Websites curated under the auspices of the HRDI, among others.

Collectively, the LLILAS Benson portfolio of digital initiatives includes more than ten million pages of digitized archival records; several hundred thousand pages of digitized full text and images, including monographs, journals, scholarly papers, manuscripts, ephemera, and so on; thousands of hours of digital audio and video recordings; and more than a hundred million Web-archived files. The collection of curated resource guides for Latin American studies contains more than ten thousand outbound links. Taken as a whole, the Websites holding these digital assets generate more than three million pageviews per year. The vast majority of the digital holdings consist of unique items, thus filling an important void for scholarship left by mass digitization efforts, such as Google Books and the Internet Archive’s Million Books Project.

LLILAS Benson is committed to promoting open access to scholarly resources. In contrast to the unique digitized materials hosted by database vendors and aggregators, such as Gale’s “World Scholar Archive: Latin America and the Caribbean” or EBSCO’s “Academic Search Complete,” nearly all the digital content that LLILAS Benson hosts is on the open Internet, available to any and all users regardless of location or affiliation, and without any type of registration. The one exception is AILLA, where no-cost registration is required to open or download media files.