About
Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (“Recovery”) is an international program to locate, preserve and disseminate Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form since colonial times until 1960. Located at the University of Houston, the program has compiled a comprehensive bibliography of books, pamphlets, manuscripts and ephemera produced by Latinos. The holdings available include thousands of original books, manuscripts, archival items and ephemera, a microfilm collection of approximately 1,400 historical newspapers, hundreds of thousands of microfilmed and digitized items, a vast collection of photographs, an extensive authority list, and personal papers. In addition, the program has published or reprinted more than 40 historical books, two anthologies, and nine volumes of research articles.
Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage is the premier center for research on Latino documentary history in the United States. The Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Digital Collections site includes digital exhibits from these collections.
Collections
The collections on this site represent a sampling of Recovery's physical collections. Archives and larger databases are available to researchers in Recovery's offices, by appointment. Recovery's EBSCO and Newsbank databases are available to libraries and institutions by subscription. Other products related to the databases are the three-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature and the first comprehensive anthologies of Latino literature: Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (Oxford) and En otra voz: antología de la literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos (Arte Público Press).
Protocols
Items are described using Dublin Core metadata. In order to enhance searchability, metadata includes Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Spanish-language tags.
Transcriptions are as true to the original document as possible, including variations in spelling. Translations are denoted in the title of the item and credit to the translator is provided under the Contributor element.
All faculty, staff, research assistants, interns, grantees, and volunteers who work on these digital collections are listed on the People page.
USLDH
These digital archives are an initiative of the US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) program at Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage serves as a venue for scholarship focused on the US Latino written legacy that has been lost, absent, repressed or underrepresented. The USLDH project will provide a physical space for the development, support and training in digital humanies projects using a vast collection of newspapers, photographs and digital materials; create opportunities and facilities for digital publication of Latino-based projects and scholarship; promote and foster interdisciplinary scholarly work; provide a communal virtual space to share knowledge and projects related to Latino digital humanities; and establish a Latino digital humanities hub.
In order to foster a network of scholars focused on US Latino digital humanities, we created the hashtag, #usLdh.