Thirty-one North-American universities formed the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP) in 1994 to explore new ways of building Latin American Studies research collections. Due to the steady reduction of acquisition funding and a perceived overreliance on a handful of foreign book dealers, librarians from these universities were concerned that their collections no longer represented the diversity of Latin American cultural and scholarly production.
LARRP has partnered with the Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC) since its early years. LANIC still hosts several LARRP projects, including the Presidential Messages database and the Latin American Open Archives Portal.
To fund LARRP’s long-standing Distributed Resources Project, participating members were asked to voluntarily allocate 7 percent of their annual Latin American Studies funds to acquire materials in a specific country or subject area. By the late 1990s, thirty LARRP institutions raised more than U.S. $300,000 a year for these materials. The project also energized bibliographers at participating institutions to pursue special acquisitions and funding for additional activities.
The initial LARRP projects were funded through the AAU and ARL by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. Followup funding through two Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) grants from the U.S. Department of Education enabled LARRP to redesign and upgrade the LAPTOC database, to expand its membership into Latin America, and to create an Internet portal for full-text resources (see LAOAP).
The project instituted an annual fee beginning in 2004 to maintain the database projects once grant funding ends. A matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched many of the Project’s initiatives. During the period 1999–2002, a $405,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education under the Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) program supported the development of a Latin American partnerships program and the enhancement of the Project’s database. The University of Texas at Austin General Libraries serves as the lead institution for the TICFIA grant. Under a second U.S. Department of Education TICFIA grant for 2002–05, LARRP received $585,000 to improve access to Latin American grey literature in the social sciences through an Open Archives Portal. The UCLA Library was the lead institution for this project.
In 2006, LARRP moved to its new administrative home at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL).
