The interface functions are basic. Text is searchable as full text, not indexed by type of text such as article title. Results can be sorted by relevance or date. Search terms are shown in excerpted context, and then highlighted in the PDF display. But it can be difficult to determine results context for several reasons: the results excerpt displays raw OCR text, often with transcription errors; if one returns to search results from the PDF page display, no highlighting differentiates which result link has been followed; in two of six results checked, the search term was not actually displayed on the page.  

The page imaged documents are presented in a standard PDF window that unfortunately does not expand to full screen. The publisher indicates that all pages were scanned in color, and it is quite valuable to have featured graphics depicted in their original color format. But low contrast levels optimized to reveal details in the numerous half-tone movie publicity photos result in murky presentation of text, often compromising legibility. The image sharpness  also varies, and the presentation images are not high resolution files. They can be downloaded as PNG files from the document PDFs.

Strengths and weaknesses

These are unique materials preserved through digitization. The collection should have varying uses for study and research of popular Latin American culture and the history of film media up through the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, it is a rather expensive investment in a relatively small group of materials. It is fortunate that MARC records have been provided, but wide indexing of the text in web scale discovery tools is recommended (despite inconsistent results in full text searching) in order to avoid these materials becoming isolated from more extensive research collections.