Building a cooperative digital libary with open source software - the case of CLACSO in Latin America

Abstract

Even though Latin America is one of the developing regions with excellent regional cooperative bibliographic databases, which is mainly due to the common use of Spanish and Portuguese in countries of the region, access to the printed documents mentioned in the bibliographies is a privilege for a very few. This situation is caused primarily by the reduced number of copies printed (in average 500 copies for academic books and 300 copies for journals) and the very high costs of postal services which make the distribution of publications and inter-library loan services very expensive.