Berkeley Summary

Stanford University's Latin American Collection

The Main (Green) Library's holdings exceed 300,000 volumes on Latin America and several thousand periodicals principally in the humanities and social sciences. The historical strength of the collections at Stanford has been on 19th and 20th century Mexico and Brazil. In recent years acquisition of the Fernando Alegría Papers and other similar collections have given Stanford unique holdings on Chilean Literature and Culture.

Although the Hoover Institution stopped collecting Latinamericana in 1993, coverage of the region dates back to 1919 and exceeds 36,000 titles. There are several archival collections, as well as more than 6,000 microfilm reels of back files of periodicals and newspapers. Hoover also has significant materials on peronismo and extensive holdings on the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

Since 1982, Stanford and UC Berkeley have had a cooperative collection agreement. In 1998, the agreement was extended to the University of Texas at Austin in an effort to provide a wider coverage of Latin American research materials.

The Stanford Libraries have also been engaged in digital projects related to Latin America. One such project is the Linking the Americas, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It has digitized over 100 books on Latin America published by the Stanford University Press as well as other collections. The digitization of the Presidential Archive of Eduardo Frei Montalva is a joint project with the Frei Foundation in Santiago.