Project MUSE, a digital database that offers full-text access to e-books and scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, is adding additional Spanish language titles from more than 75 Latin American and Spanish university presses. The ambition over the coming months is to expand the scope of the new material to cover 100 publishers and "thousands" of new books, in Spanish and Portuguese, according to a press release.
Of the 75 new publishers, 55 are from Colombia, with the remainder coming from Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Spain. Hipertexto-Netizen and Siglo, two prominent digital distribution companies, are handling the logistics.
Previously, the database offered 1,000 Spanish titles, out of a total of 90,000 available on the platform. Project MUSE sought out additional books after demand for Spanish books doubled since 2020, "revealing an unmet, worldwide demand for this content," said the company.
Project MUSE worked with the Association of University Presses of Latin America and the Caribbean (EULAC), which represents over 350 university presses across Latin America, to establish relationships with publishers. Project MUSE also enlisted members of SALALM, the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, for guidance.
“Libraries have expressed challenges to finding recently published Spanish language books,” Kelley Squazzo, director of library and publisher partnerships for Project MUSE, said. “We are very glad to be able to fill a market need and at the same time support and elevate the important work published by university presses in Latin America.”
Sayri Karp, president of EULAC, added, “EULAC’s mission is the encouragement and promotion of academic thought and editorial production from our region. University press publishers have a great opportunity to take the bridge of Hipertexto-Netizen and Siglo to join other important publishers on Project MUSE to bring prestige, visibility, and sales to their books.”
