As the first CD-ROM to be reviewed in the HAHR, this one is appropriate in that it records a reference tool unrivaled for its longevity and usefulness. The Handbook of Latin American Studies has been produced annually since 1936 by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. Published at different times by the university presses of Harvard, Texas, and Florida, the HLAS alternates its annual offerings between social science and humanities volumes. Historians, known to be consumers (or at least observers) of different disciplines, typically make use of both volumes. The HLAS has served the needs of dedicated and casual observers of Latin America, undergraduates and graduate students, professors and government bureaucrats. The transfer of its contents from the paper medium to a CD-ROM was made possible by grants from the Fundación MAPFRE América and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project has been very successful, and it signifies the possibility of enhancing literature searches of the nearly 250,000 records this respected tool comprises.
The program requires a 486-class computer with a minimum of 4 megabytes of RAM (8 MB are recommended), a DOS 5.0 or higher operating system, Microsoft Windows 3.1 or higher, at least 1 MB of hard disk space, and a CD-ROM drive. In addition, the program runs under OS/2 Warp with Windows support. Installation was effortless; for those who wish to save hard disk space, the program itself may be run from the hard disk while the data are accessed from the CD-ROM. Otherwise, the entire CD’s contents are transferred to the hard disk.
The user may run the program as a Novice (the default mode) or as an Expert. The initial screen presents the Main and Search windows. The Novice mode presents fill-in items in standard graphic input fashion. The user fills in terms for searching that are connected by a healthy choice of Boolean options (and, or, not, xor, with, same, near, and adj) governing the range of the terms’ relationships. In addition, one can search for terms within a specific HLAS volume, year, range of items, and type (Items or Essays). Search terms can be further refined by subfields, including author, title, description, annotation, subject heading, and “all.” A helpful description and purpose of each field appears at the bottom of the screen as the mouse pointer passes over the item.
The Results window provides information on the number of documents that satisfy the search request. Buttons at the bottom of this window offer several options for acting on the search results, ranging from a brief list of the documents to their full texts. Other buttons help to refine the search further. Clicking a box on the left of each listed item tags it for full-text reading. The text, of course, is not editable, but it can be highlighted with the mouse, copied through the “clipboard” and pasted into one’s own word processor. I found no problems in copying selections from several entries to the clipboard under Windows 3.1 and pasting the materials from the clipboard under OS/2 Warp into a document using Nota Bene’s word processor under DOS. Alternatively, one can save all the documents indiscriminately as one file; or save the history of the queries as a file without the actual documents. The opportunities are ample for creating customized bibliographies based on literature searches in the HLAS by bringing the materials into bibliography management software; Nota Bene’s IBID, or Citation, among others.
Because of the straightforward nature of the printed version, nothing is lost by using the CD-ROM. As a comparison, the CD-ROM of Historical Abstracts works less well, largely because the print version offers such a rich and multirelational listing of recent publications in all fields of history, along with an extremely powerful and equally important index. By itself, that index serves as a tool for tracing related titles. Thus, the CD-ROM version offers fewer opportunities to browse and enhance the search. While I ask students not to favor the disk-based version of Historical Abstracts over the print volumes, I have no hesitation in recommending the HLAS Retrospective version, as the publishers have described this disk.
As a search engine, the CD-ROM version of the HLAS is easy useful, and reasonably priced. It fulfills the same basic duties as the bound version. How well a literature search is carried out depends entirely on the inquisitive acumen of the researcher. In this regard, the mind, not the medium, is the message.
