Creating Digital Open-Access Latin American Literature and Art – Inti Project Collaboration

Since the middle of the 1990’s, higher education teaching, learning and research have evolved to include an ever greater digital presence. These digital developments in the humanities have lagged most other areas in academia, retaining a preference for the physical print. A team of Latin American scholars, faculty and digital librarians at a US institution of higher education has successfully collaborated since 2008 to publish the Inti: Revista de Literatura Hispánica journal’s original, peer-reviewed literature and art as open-access digital resources for teaching, learning and research. What began as a collaborative digitization project has in 7 years evolved into a full-scale digital publishing enterprise including print-on-demand for Inti’s 350 continuing print-subscription libraries. Three leaders - the faculty-director, faculty head of digital publishing and faculty library director - have established a publishing platform and infrastructure with multimedia components, which present over 40 years of unique, highly-regarded and fully open-access digital collections of Latin American literature and art, most of which is available only in Inti. The contents are fully discoverable via all freely available search tools and are indexed in all the major indices, including the Modern Language Association / MLA and JSTOR. Inti content visibility has evolved exponentially from the 2008 print maximum of 350 readers to over 12,000 readers (full PDF downloads) per month in 2015. The article relates the origin, process, value, sustainability and scalability of the unique collaborative digital publishing project. The formerly print-only access to Inti has been significantly enhanced for researchers through provisions of the open-access digital files for all issues of Inti since its 1974 inception