“The information environment has changed so dramatically since HAPI's beginnings in the mid-1970s,” says editor Orchid Mazurkiewicz. “Forty years later, we're constantly looking for ways to maintain the relevance of the index and increase its value for the students and scholars who use it.”
By Catherine Schuknecht (UCLA, 2015)
UCLA International Institute, March 18, 2015 — It has been 40 years since the Hispanic American Periodicals Index (http: //hapi.ucla.edu) (HAPI) was first published at UCLA by the Latin American Institute. HAPI is a nonprofit bibliographic database of the University of California recognized internationally by Latin American scholars for its expert subject indexing. The database enables researchers to access published articles from and about Latin America, the Caribbean, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and Hispanic/Latino culture in the United States.
HAPI includes complete bibliographic citations and subject indexing for articles, original literary works, documents and other materials that appear in over 675 leading scholarly journals in the social sciences and humanities in 35 countries around the world.
A brief history
In 1973, Latin Americanist librarian Barbara Valk created HAPI as a local project at Arizona State University. Valk’s peers recognized the index’s potential as an essential resource for libraries and HAPI quickly transformed into an annual publication for worldwide distribution.
Soon afterwards, the UCLA Latin America Institute invited Valk to move to Los Angeles with the project, with funding provided by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1975, the first official volume of HAPI was released. Valk continued to work on the index until her retirement in 2005. She passed away in 2013.
Today, HAPI is a self-supporting enterprise. It derives its income from subscriptions, primarily from university and college libraries in the United States and Europe. However, the index also has subscribers as far afield as Israel, India, Australia and Japan. In order to promote greater accessibility to the index in Latin America, where the majority of the indexed materials are published, HAPI has offered free subscriptions to academic institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean since 2008.
First published online in 1997, the database currently indexes over 380 journals and is updated daily by a team of 35 dedicated Latin Americanist librarians and scholars who volunteer their services. Because library acquisitions departments are now more likely to purchase electronic materials over printed copies, HAPI ceased its print edition in 2008; the index is now available exclusively online.
“HAPI has benefited from the remarkable dedication of the librarians who produce the index — both staff and volunteers,” explains Orchid Mazurkiewicz, director and editor of the database. “Associate Editor Ruby Gutierrez, for example, has been with the index for 21 years and two of our volunteer indexers have been with HAPI even longer,” she adds. (Gayle Williams of Florida International University has been a contributor since 1978, and Nancy Hallock of Harvard, since 1983.)
HAPI volunteers are experts in Latin American history, societies and literature. Many have native or near-native proficiency in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian and English. Together with the program’s editorial staff, they add roughly 7,000 records each year to HAPI’s current database of approximately 300,000 records. These records date from 1970 to the present, with full-text links to over 170,000 articles and other printed material.
Comprehensive, relevant and accessible
To fill a gap between the first volume of HAPI, published in1975, and a previous index published by the Organization of American States, which covered journal articles published through 1970, HAPI undertook a project in the 1980s that indexed articles published from 1970 through 1974. The complete database was first searchable online via Telnet in 1991 and by CD-ROM in 1992; online access through the HAPI website debuted in 1997.
Mazurkiewicz has overseen several improvements to the production of the HAPI database since she took over from Barbara Valk in 2006, including a complete overhaul of its architecture and automation of the index production process.
The newest update of the HAPI website launched in summer 2014. The site is now fully trilingual in Spanish, English and Portuguese and features a new design based on extensive user input and testing. For more information on using the newly designed site and volunteering for HAPI, please click here (http: //www.hapi.ucla.edu/).
Search results for the keyword “U.S.-Mexico borderlands.”
“The information environment has changed so dramatically since HAPI’s beginnings in the mid-1970s,” notes Mazurkiewicz. “Forty years later, we’re constantly looking for ways to maintain the relevance of the index and increase its value for the students and scholars who use it.”
One way in which she has broadened the scope of the index is by promoting access to the many Latin American journals available online (thanks to the region’s Open Access movement). As a result, over 75 percent of the Latin American journal articles indexed by HAPI now include links to the full, freely available text.
Mazurkiewicz also continues to do research on the information-seeking behavior of Latin Americanist students and professors in order to improve the database’s usability.