The University of Florida Libraries began
collecting Latin American research resources in the late 1920s.
Following World War II, Rockefeller Foundation funded the Farmington
Plan, multi-year projects to acquire foreign resources for use in the
United States. Dedicated University of Florida faculty and library
staff set out to systematically collect a vast collection of Caribbean
and Latin American monograph, journal, and newspaper archives.
Microfilm was used to capture and preserve
many of these rare, often unique materials.
The Latin
American Collection, established in 1967, focuses on enriching these
resources. The Collection, including holdings in the Department of Special Collections, holds more than 450,000 volumes of printed
materials; a growing number of electronic resources; nearly 50,000
microfilm positive reels and more than 8,500 microfilm negative reels,
containing nearly 5 million exposures. The fact that 7,000 reels of the Collections'
microfilm negatives are newspaper holdings indicates the collection
development and preservation effort emphasis. Indeed, the Latin
American Collection's archive of master microfilm negatives has become
the archive-of-record as source originals were lost to fire, hurricane,
war, and climate.
The Caribbean
Newspaper Imaging Project was established, with funding from the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation and the University
of Florida Libraries, to
provide access to these collections on-line.
