Guides: Latin American Studies: Research Resources Beyond Penn

Digital Collections

These resources contain materials that aren't specific to any particular country, but may have topical areas of focus.

LACLI (Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latinx, and Iberian Online Free E-Resources)
LACLI is a collective effort to create a warehouse of online free e-resources with Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latinx, and Iberian full content.
Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano (BDPI)
Includes digitized books, manuscripts, images, musical scores, newspapers, magazines, and sound recordings from many Latin American national libraries
World Scholar: Latin America & the Caribbean
This link provides partial access to an eclectic full text database of primary and secondary sources, that includes monographs, manuscripts, pamphlets, letters, academic journals, maps, diaries, newspaper accounts, audio, and video.
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The Historical Collections part of the database includes large primary source collections, some already held by the library in microform (e.g., Conquistadors, Latin American Independence). Here there is access to the following only: Brazil’s Popular Groups, 1966-1986; Latin American History and Culture: An Archival Record, Series 1: The Yale University Collection of Latin American Manuscripts; Mexican and Central American Political and Social Ephemera; Selections from 19th Century U.S. Newspapers.
Digital National Security Archive
The database includes more than 94,000 of the most important declassified documents regarding critical U.S. policy decisions.
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For more information, check out the Digital NSA libguide https://proquest.libguides.com/dnsa
Digital Library of the Caribbean
dLOC is a cooperative of Partners within the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean that provides users with access to Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
Latin American Web Archiving Project
The Latin American Government Documents Archive (LAGDA) seeks to preserve and facilitate access to a wide range of ministerial and presidential documents from 18 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The Archive contains copies of the Web sites of approximately 300 government ministries and presidencies.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive. Parts 1-4
Claiming that it is the largest digital archive on the history of slavery, the publisher states that "...[once completed, this digital collection will comprise five million pages of documents."
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Documents on the arguments for and against slavery during the 17th-19th centuries, the worldwide Abolitionist movement and its internal debates, perspectives on colonization, slavery and the US Constitution, the changing world of African Americans in the American South. Penn has access to part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition, part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, and part III: The Institution of Slavery.
Latin American Travelogues
The goal of this project is to create a digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-19th centuries.

These resources are examples of country-specific digital collections. This list isn't exhaustive, but only presents an example of what is available. View the LACLI database (described above) for more options.

Colecciones Mexicanas
Chilean Protest Murals
Feminism in Cuba, 1898-1958
Cuban sources from the period from Cuban independence to the end of the Batista regime, the collection covers feminism, women in politics, literature by Cuban women and the legal status of Cuban women.

Digitized Map Collections

Alabama Maps Historical Maps Archive
The Historical Map Archive is a digitized collection of selected map holdings from sources including the University of Alabama Map Library, the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, the Birmingham Public Library Cartography Collection of the Birmingham Public Library, the Geological Survey of Alabama, Samford University Special Collections Library, and the Alabama Department of Archives and History. It includes many maps of Latin America.
Caribmap
Caribmap is a mobile-friendly resource for exploring historical map images of Caribbean islands. The site presents images of approximately 1800 maps of the islands printed over five centuries (16th–20th).
New York Public Library Digital Collections
The NYPL has numerous collections of digitized maps.
Library of Congress Digital Map Collections
Royal Geographical Society
The Royal Geographical Society Digital Archives contains thousands of maps for Latin America.
David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University
The Center collection consists of over 200,000 maps, atlases, globes, and related materials.
LANIC Latin American Network Information Center
An index of digitized maps. This list is no longer updated, so may contain broken links.
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection: Maps of the Americas
Digitized maps from the The Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) Map Collection. As of 2021 the site is no longer maintained, so you may find broken links.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons can be a good source for free to use digitized historical maps. This example search is for maps of South America.

Statistical Data Online

Censuses and statistics
Latinobarometro
Latin American public opinion data starting in 1995.
Latin American Public Opinion Project

Latin American Studies

Digital Collections

These resources contain materials that aren't specific to any particular country, but may have topical areas of focus.

These resources are examples of country-specific digital collections. This list isn't exhaustive, but only presents an example of what is available. View the LACLI database (described above) for more options.

Digitized Map Collections

Statistical Data Online

Other Research Collections and Resources