Digital Resources: The Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI)
Authors: Mazurkiewicz Orchid 
Published: May 2016

HAPI began as a local project at Arizona State University (ASU) in 1973. Its founder, Barbara G. Valk, the librarian responsible for Latin American materials at ASU, wanted to provide an index to the university’s periodical literature on the region, which was something that had been unavailable since the cessation of the OAS-sponsored Index to Latin American Periodicals in 1970. Following the success of the project, HAPI moved to the UCLA Latin American Center (now Latin American Institute) in 1976, where Valk used a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund further development of an annual printed edition of the index. This annual volume would continue to be published through 2008. HAPI was first searchable online via Telnet in 1991 and CD-ROM in 1992; its first website debuted in 1997. Now exclusively available online, HAPI is a self-supporting, not-for-profit publishing unit within UCLA, with subscribers (primarily university and college libraries) around the world. Free subscriptions are provided to institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

HAPI now contains over 300,000 citations to journal articles about Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latina/os in the United States and around the world. Articles date back to 1968 following an early retrospective indexing project to cover the gap between the last volume of the Index to Latin American Periodicals and the first volume of HAPI. Almost 400 journal titles are currently indexed and over 600 titles have been included since HAPI’s creation. Subject coverage includes the social sciences and the humanities; history titles represent the largest single subject area covered. HAPI aims to provide access to the most well-known and influential titles in Latin American studies as well as to regional titles that are less well known and often underrepresented in disciplinary indexes with limited Latin American and Caribbean content. Librarians (staff and volunteers) with relevant subject training examine each article and create bibliographic descriptions, subject headings, and keywords for multiple access points to the journal content. Searches can be carried out in English, Spanish, or Portuguese on HAPI’s trilingual website.

HAPI has provided links to the online full-text content of many of its indexed titles since 2003. At that time, with university and college libraries spending heavily on commercial databases, students and scholars were increasingly expecting easy access to the full text of journal articles, but few Latin American and Caribbean journals were included in these commercial products. With limited financial and technological resources, HAPI was unable to become a full-text publisher; instead, HAPI staff focused on tracking down and linking to the full text of the indexed journals wherever they could find it, especially in two Open Access regional databases: Mexico’s Redalyc and Brazil’s SciELO. A vibrant Open Access movement in Latin America has led to a dramatic increase in the free online availability of the region’s journals and unprecedented access to this content for scholars around the world. Over 75 percent of the Latin American journals indexed by HAPI now include links to freely available full text.