Electronic publishing in librarianship and information science in Latin America ¿ a step towards development?
Ian Johnson, Virginia Cano · 2008
ing and indexing Latin American librarianship and information science journals A number of efforts were made to establish abstracting and indexing services in the librarianship and information science field in Argentina, Brazil and Spain during the 1970s and 1980s, but these made little impact and have generally been discontinued (Sabor 1977; Brito 1987; Rodriguez and Feria 1990; Bustamante 1990; Zielinski 1995). The adoption of a collaborative model has underpinned the only index to journal articles on librarianship and information science from or about Latin America that has survived. INFOBILA was initiated in 1986 by the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico Centro Universitario de Investigaciones Bibliotecologicas (UNAM-CUIB), based on formally agreed collaboration with a network of partners which at present covers thirteen countries in addition to Mexico: Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Peru, Republica Dominicana, Uruguay and Venezuela. Even in INFOBILA there appear to be deficiencies in the coverage of the region's librarianship and information science journals. It is largely reliant on the partner institutions to provide abstracts of journals published in their countries, which should have enabled it to cover 80%-90% of the region's professional output. In fact, although it has indexed papers taken from nearly 200 journals and newsletters, only 128 were published in Spanish or Portuguese, and not all of the latter are primarily information and library science journals.