HAPI+SciELO-México

HAPI+SciELO-México is a collaboration to add article records from the SciELO-México online journal collection to the HAPI database. The project provides benefits to both partners: HAPI adds more content to its database and SciELO-México has an additional means for discovery of their journal collection. 

HAPI (https://hapi.ucla.edu) is an index of scholarly periodical literature in the social sciences and humanities on Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latinx populations in the US and around the world. It has been published by UCLA’s Latin American Institute since the mid-1970s and includes content dating to the late 1960s. HAPI began as a print index, later transitioning to print and online, and now is online only. The HAPI database includes a mix of titles published in the region and Latin American studies journals published throughout the world. While the index is self-supporting within the university and we rely on subscriptions, primarily from universities and colleges, to pay for the expenses associated with producing HAPI, we do provide free subscriptions to Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Our partner in this project is SciELO-México (https//www.scielo.org.mx). SciELO (https://www.scielo.org) is one of the most significant open access (OA) journal platforms in Latin America and has been a global leader in promoting a Latin American perspective on open access. SciELO was created by Brazil’s Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo in 1997 to provide a digital platform for OA journal publication and dissemination as well as promote editorial standards. It’s developed into an international network comprising fifteen countries—twelve in Latin America, as well as Spain, Portugal, and South Africa, and some subject and format-specific initiatives. Each national node in the network manages their own journal collection on the platform via a nationally recognized research institution. Mexico joined the SciELO network in 2006 and is administered by the Dirección General de Bibliotecas y Servicios Digitales de Información at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

HAPI now imports descriptive data from select journals hosted on the SciELO-México platform into our database, then links from the new HAPI records back to the full text of the articles on the SciELO-México site. These new records are briefly reviewed by HAPI staff on import but receive no subject indexing. Subject analysis and assignment of headings from HAPI’s controlled vocabulary are labor-intensive work; by adding the SciELO-México records as is, we can increase the material that researchers have access to in our index with a minimal investment of staff time. This limits the subject access for the SciELO-México records relative to HAPI’s standard records. Nevertheless, significant access points remain: journal names, article titles, author names, abstracts, and the subject keywords and translations provided by SciELO-México. 

We’ve selected thirty titles from SciELO-México’s collection to include as part of the project. They reflect a variety of subject matter: education, literature, history, business, geography, public opinion, political science, public health, administration, and economics. These thirty titles are in addition to forty-nine titles from the SciELO-México that HAPI already includes as part of our standard indexing program. 

We launched the project in July 2021 and have imported over two thousand records to date. These include retrospective additions for the selected journals back to 2016. Once the import process is complete, SciELO-México records are immediately findable through either the basic or advanced search option in HAPI and the results are interspersed among the standard HAPI results, although with a small marker to differentiate the former and latter. Image 1 is a screenshot of the HAPI website search results page showing article records from the Revista Mexicana de Opinión Pública, one of the new SciELO-México titles. A small graphic of “H+S” appears at the end of the citation information, different from the display of standard HAPI records. If the user scrolls over the graphic, a mouseover displays “This article is part of the HAPI+Scielo-México collection.” 

This project was partially funded by the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) Award for Institutional Collaborative Initiatives.