An initial batch of nearly ninety digitized brochures and pamphlets on women’s rights and activism across Latin America and the Caribbean is now available in Princeton’s Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera as a result of a new collaborative initiative between Dartmouth Libraries and Princeton University Library. 

All of the original ephemeral pieces, originally printed between the 1980s and early 2000s, are part of the Marysa Navarro papers at Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library. They were digitized and added to the Digital Archive thanks to the initiative of Dartmouth librarian Jill Baron, who, while examining the archive, realized that it contained, dispersed across several boxes and folders, a wealth of primary sources in the form of brochures, flyers and pamphlets produced by social activists, labor organizers, health providers, and various types of non-governmental organizations. Baron saw an opportunity to make them more easily available by taking advantage of Princeton’s expertise in offering digital access to ephemeral materials. For Princeton, it is an invaluable opportunity to continue developing collaborative approaches to collecting and offering wide access to these types of primary resources. 

This post features a small selection of items from the initial digital batch. Click on the images to view all pages and a brief bibliographic description. The complete batch can be browsed here. More pieces will continue to be added in the coming months.

Princeton University Library is pleased to announce that an early and vast subset of its renowned Latin American Ephemera Collection that until recently was only accessible in microfilm or in Special Collections is now digitally available on its Digital PUL site.

In time, Latin American Ephemera: Digitized Microfilm Sets will include approximately 350 thematically and geographically organized sub-collections, ranging in size from a handful of items to hundreds of them, that were assembled and microfilmed between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s. Among the topics most commonly addressed by the collections are politics, human and civil rights, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, environment and ecology, education, labor, health, and socioeconomic conditions.

The Central Library of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and Princeton University Library have partnered to make digitally available to researchers, students, and the general public, the Colección Documental sobre la violencia política en el Perú, an extensive collection documenting the tragic period of terrorism and political violence that plagued Peru in the late twentieth century.

The collection, compiled by Gustavo Gorriti Ellenbogen during his years as an investigative journalist during the period, consists of a vast array of documents including political brochures, flyers, reports from political organizations, periodical publications, newspaper clippings, personal documentation, books and literature of the time. It is probably the most complete and detailed documentary collection for the analysis of the terrorist phenomenon in Peru.

Records of Resistance: Documenting Global Activism 1933 to 2021, Princeton University Library’s latest exhibition, includes images that range from sacred Passover Haggadot that embody Jews’ spiritual resistance to their oppressors during and immediately after the Holocaust, to dramatic photographs of marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, to vibrant posters, pamphlets and photographs created by protesters taking to the streets of Lahore, Pakistan and Santiago, Chile, only a few years ago.

The exhibition content originating in Chile relates to the nation-wide mass protests known as the Estallido Social (social outburst), a series of nation-wide mass protests that went on steadily from October 2019 to March 2020 and made painfully visible the deep social discontent of broad sectors of Chilean society.