As summer is fading away and the new academic year takes off, I’d like to share with ACLAIIR some notes from REDIAL’s annual meeting in June. This year we celebrated our 24th annual conference in connection with CEISAL’s 7th Congress at Universidade Fernando Pessoa in Porto, June 12th-15th. REDIAL co-organized with Elda González, researcher at Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC in Madrid, a symposium on migration at the Congress: “Los que van, los que vienen y los que regresan. Los movimientos migratorios transoceánicos en el siglo XX y XXI: fondos documentales e investigaciones” – a joint venture between researchers, librarians and archivists with participants from Argentina, Brazil, United States, Norway, Germany, Italy and Spain. Papers from the Congress will be published Open Access later this year. In relation with the Congress, the Universidade Fernando Pessoa’s center for Latin American studies, Núcleo de Estudo Latino-Americanos, inaugurated their new Latin Americanist collections space “Espaço Carlos Fuentes”. Being members of REDIAL, their librarian Carla Azevedo was our local organizer.
Carla Azevedo, librarian at the Universidade Fernando Pessoa, presents to REDIAL on Portuguese Latin American Studies.
CEISAL (Consejo Europeo de Investigaciones Sociales de América Latina) elected a new board with Carlos Quenan at the Institut des Amérique in France as the new President. CEISAL partners REDIAL in running the website on European Latinamericanism, America Latina: Portal Europeo and the journal Anuario Americanista Europeo.
The central theme for this year’s volume of the journal is “Gender and Migration”. October 1st is the deadline for articles in the peer review sections, including the one REDIAL is managing, “Documentación y comunicación americanista: análisis e investigaciones”. For the other REDIAL section “Fondos, recursos y publicaciones“, that welcomes shorter and more descriptive contributions, we can receive articles until December. We welcome articles in Spanish, Portuguese or English. The 2014 volume will have “Digital Latin Americanism” as the central theme, with Aquiles Alencar Brayner and Luis Rodríguez Yunta as editors for both the CEISAL and REDIAL sections. The idea is to explore how the concepts of Digital Humanities and Digital Social Sciences are handled in European research on Latin America. From the 2014 volume Frank Egerton will be a member of the Editorial Board.
Other good news related to the UK and REDIAL is that the Institute of Latin American Studies has rejoined as members. Do not hesitate to contact us if you’re considering joining us as well!
REDIALeros with Fernando Pessoa!
During REDIAL’s working sessions a lot of our discussions circled around the Portal and the development of its different databases. The main UK Latin Americanist journals are indexed by the editorial team, but if you find that there are journals or articles missing, your participation is always welcomed. In our thematic sub-portal “Migraciones” we’re building a resource on migration between Latin America and Europe from Independence to present times with publications published from 1990 onwards. In this sub-portal we also register articles on the theme from non-Latin Americanist journals and also books. One database where there used to be UK participation is the dissertation database that contains 1778 thesis from the UK from 1980-2002, would that be a database that would interest you to keep updated from a UK point of view? For the database on researchers it’s always a big help if the persons closest to home could help in updating. We also of course welcome any academic news and information on new publications. Any news entered in our Portal is disseminated every fortnight in our electronic bulletin Puentes that reaches over 3700 subscribers. There’s a special page for cooperation or otherwise just mail us. Our blog IguAnalista is another option open for your contributions.
During this autumn we hope to finally finish the translation of the portal’s interface into English and Portuguese. One of our new areas of interest that we plan to explore during the coming year is how our portal could be a resource for finding digitalized Latin Americanist collections at a European level. This will probably be one of the themes when our Spanish members meet for their annual reunion in Madrid in November, and certainly when we meet for our 2014 conference and 25th anniversary in Bordeaux and Saint-Émilion in late May or early June next year!
Anna Svensson
President of REDIAL 2012-2014
Gothenburg University Library, Sweden
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