The division provides reference services to the US Congress, US government personnel, scholars, university students, and the general public. It also plays a major role in developing and maintaining the Library's preeminent collections of Hispanic materials as well as in preparing bibliographies, manuscript guides, and other aids and reference tools designed to assist users of these collections. Practically all universities whose curricula include Latin American studies programs subscribe to the Handbook which can be found in the libraries of such institutions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Latin American universities which can afford it subscribe to the Handbook , and those who cannot usually receive it directly from the Library of Congress through our exchange program. The print edition of the Handbook , an annual annotated bibliography of about 5,500 entries, includes evaluative annotations prepared by 130 scholars who donate their services to the Library.
Volumes alternate annually between the humanities and social sciences.
Offprints of selected disciplines are available for purchase through the Latin American Studies Association . In the mid-1980s, the Library of Congress decided to test electronic typesetting of bibliographies using the Handbook as a pilot project. Since that time, the Handbook portion of the database has grown to more than 70,000 entries, over half annotated, a figure which is growing by an additional 10,000 entries annually, of which about 5,000 are annotated by scholars and appear in the printed volume. From volume 50 onward, in order to produce the print edition of each Handbook volume, bibliographic information for each publication sent to Handbook contributors for review and possible annotation in the print volume must first be input into the database. For analytic entries such as journal articles, chapters from books, and papers from published conference proceedings, bibliographic records are created from scratch by Handbook staff.