New Hispanic & Latinx Experience Database

With financial support from LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network, Monroe Library has just acquired a recently-launched newspaper database. This database, Hispanic Life in America, covers Hispanic and Latin history through an impressive number of primary source documents. The number of newspapers included in the collection is impressive. It includes publications in a number of languages, but the most heavily represented are Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Most of the papers in the database were published in the Western Hemisphere, but it also includes some publications from Africa and Asia. The U.S., Mexico, and South America are heavily represented, but users will also be interested in items from the rest of Central America and the Caribbean. 

Historically, the collection is expansive. It stretches from the time of Spanish colonization to the Sleepy Lagoon trial of 1942 in Southern California. Many of the older documents are available as image files only, which limits accessibility for those using screen readers. However, the more recent documents exist in screen readable format. The collection includes a large number of images, particularly for earlier dates. Users can sort and filter results according to a variety of factors: date, source type, source name, era, language, geographical location of publication, and presidential era. Key search terms are highlighted in yellow in the scans of each result. A clipping function allows users to download, print, or save a specific part of a scanned document rather than the whole document. 
 

Loyola has purchased access to this database in perpetuity, however there is a separate, subscription-only segment of the resource. Because this additional segment adds new materials every day, it is not available for purchase as a completed collection. If our Loyola users find Hispanic Life in America’s historic contents useful for study, librarians would love to hear about it. High levels of interest in the portion of the database we own will be crucial in ongoing conversations about subscribing to the resource’s contemporary segment.