LIBRARY
New York City Consortium for Latin American Studies
The two NYCCLAS library systems offer complementary strengths and a long tradition of contributing to local, regional, national, and international efforts to promote access to Latin American studies resources. CU's network of 22 campus libraries holds an estimated 10.3 million volumes, 102,253 serial subscriptions, 6.3 million microforms, and extensive collections of other non-book formats. The Latin American collections exceed 400,000 titles, of which over 270,000 are in Latin American languages, and approximately 1,500 serials along with microforms, videos, DVDs, sound recordings, and maps. Geographic strengths include materials from and about Mexico, the Southern Cone, Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean. Subject specializations are architecture, fine arts, economic development, history, human rights, literature, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Butler Library houses a Latin American Studies Reading Room which contains 5,000 core texts to support graduate study and research. The Libraries of NYU hold collections totaling more than 5 million book volumes, 67,000 journal subscriptions, 5.4 million microforms, 500,000 government documents, 104,000 sound and video recordings and a wide range of electronic resources , as well as music scores, playscripts and one of the nation's largest collections of United Nations documents. The Bobst Library includes 219,500 Latin American titles, including 559 current journal subscriptions. The historical strengths at NYU are in history, performing arts, music, media studies and migration studies, and regional strengths include Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and the Caribbean. Between 2004 and 2007, the Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM) transferred its Library of Caribbean Research of nearly 10,000 monographs to NYU, including government documents, rare nineteenth-century newspapers, doctoral theses, and typescripts covering all major disciplines in the social sciences; the holdings complement research and video collections focused on Caribbean Pidgin and Creole languages. The archival portion of the collection includes original unpublished manuscripts related to Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, Bolivia, and elsewhere. The special audio-visual collection called The Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL)-a collaboration between NYU Libraries and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics-brings together in one place Latin American video source material that prior to now has been available only in small, little-known archives. Trilingual Artist Profiles provide additional context to the videos and ensure wide accessibility to audiences around the Americas. The CU and NYU libraries offer a wide range of electronic resources to students and faculty via computer networks. As of early 2009, Columbia was providing access to over 88,000 electronic journals, 1,000 databases, and 732,429 electronic books. In the past five years alone, Bobst has added 49,987 electronic journals, 1,060 databases and 537,000 electronic books to the collection. Major electronic research tools for LAS include the Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI), the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the Latin American Newsstand, and the World Newspaper Archive.