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Latin America Online: Best Databases for News, Business and Current Affairs

by Andrew Levinson

The following article was published in the December 1993 issue of Database magazine (Vol. 16, No. 6, p. 14)

When the Latin American personal computer market was taking off in the mid-1980s, the president of one export consulting firm used to startle potential clients by beginning his presentations with the statement: "If you are looking for a Latin American marketing strategy, you don't know what you're doing. If you already have one, it's wrong."

He would go on to explain that because of Latin America's vast, continental dimensions and the sharp differences among its countries and regions, no uniform, "one size fits all" Latin American strategy could hope to succeed. A viable marketing approach could be based on the four major countries (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela) or the three major regions (the Southern Cone, the Andean Group and Mexico/Central America). But any attempt to treat the area as if it were a single market was doomed to failure.

This insight is a crucial for information professionals today as it is for exporters of tangible goods. Whether your job is finding information on the market for laser printers or the status of human rights, a successful search strategy will almost always require working on a country by country basis. Using " Latin America" as a search concept will either miss large numbers of relevant records or produce giant and unworkable "kitchen sink" search sets. Individual countries like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela are where things actually happen south of the border. "Latin America" is an abstraction.

It's easy to get the opposite impression reading U.S. newspapers and magazines. Reports from the region are often bundled into a single article titled. "The Latin American Debt Crisis" or "Privatization in Latin America. " Recent discussion of NAFTA and other regional trade agreements also tend to convey an impression of Latin America as a single economic bloc, somewhat like the European community.

But it's not. Privatization in Mexico is occurring in a totally different institutional and political context than it is in Argentina or Brazil. Equally, no Latin America regional organization has influence remotely comparable to Brussels and the EEC. Despite a common language and history of Spanish colonialism everywhere in the region except Brazil, from a practical business or journalistic point of view, the differences among individual Latin American countries are still substantially greater than the similarities.

Latin American Information on DIALOG

The problem that confronts a DIALOG searcher is certainly not a lack of data. One manual for a DIALOG training session of Latin America took the admirably muscular approach of searching all 375 DIALINDEX files for the names of the Latin countries. The search produced over three million hits just in the title, lead paragraph and descriptor fields; 76 titles each had over 10,000 references 1.

While this offers reassuring evidence of DIALOG's resources, the results are too broad to offer much practical guidance in choosing or evaluating specific files. A more manageable list can be put together by separating the databases that are focused on Latin American news and business affairs from those that mention the region in other contexts.

Many scientific databases like MEDLINE, BIOSIS Previews, Zoological Record and SciSearch have substantial numbers of records that refer to Latin American countries, for example, as do specialized databases like GeoRef and Agricola. Equally, many directory databases like LC MARC or the Enycyclopedia of Associations contain records covering Latin America. Business- oriented directory files, like Piers Imports, PTS International Forecasts, or D&B-International Dun's Market Identifiers, also detail individual exports to Latin American, national statistics or company profiles as part of their global coverage.

Focusing only to text or bibliographic databases that cover general and business news in Latin America produces a more manageable list of 36 files. Even so, the number of records is daunting. Most of these databases have several hundred of several thousand records with geographic codes or datelines from Latin America. These 36 files have 153,330 records for Mexico, for example, 43,690 for Venezuela and 15,783 for even a tiny country like Ecuador.

Test Searches On DIALOG

A clearer picture emerges when some "real-world" searches are run Table 1 shows the raw number of hits in each file on four political and three business search terms. Table 2 shows how these files rank relative to each other.

The four political terms were chosen to test each file's coverage of both a major and minor country (Mexico and Ecuador) and, within each, of a major and a minor political figure. Cuahtemoc Cardenas is the leading political opposition figure in Mexico; Manuel Buendia was a Mexican newspaper columnist assassinated several years ago during an investigation into government corruption. Rodrigo Borja is the former President of Ecuador; Abdala Bucaram is a perennial political gadfly from the port city of Guayaquil.

The business search terms were the names of the state run oil companies of Mexico, Venezuela and Ecuador. Since petroleum plays a strategic role in the economy of all three countries, this gives a reasonably consistent basis for comparing the way these files cover business in several nations.

Table 1 is useful for comparing individual files. Table 2, however, provides an additional perspective by converting the raw numbers into relative ranks and then averaging the four political and three business searches into two summary numbers. The files in Table 2 are also separated into several subcategories. This makes a file's relative position within a group of similar files more evident.

Looking At The Results

Looking first at the major newswires, most dramatic is the clear dominance of Reuters TEXTLINE. It is not only the leader in both the political and business categories, but, in some cases, equals all the other newswires combined in the raw number of hits.

TEXTLINE also offers highly sophisticated and detailed indexing of each record, not only by country, region and industry, but also by 300 event codes that can be used almost like descriptors in many business and economic searches. TEXTLINE is the only newswire with this feature and is thus unrivaled for broad, multiconcept searches (e.g., mergers and takeovers in the Mexican hotel industry).

In the category of full-text newspapers, the rankings confirms the reputations of both the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald as leaders in political reporting from Latin America. The raw numbers also reveal a clear geographic specialization between the coverage of Mexico and South America. The LA Times has substantially more hits than the Miami Herald on Mexican politics. On Ecuador, the reverse is true.

In the remaining two categories, bibliographic database and full-text magazines/newsletters, the key result is the clear advantage held by two specialized databases--INFO-SOUTH and PTS Newsletter Database, the latter carrying Latin American files produced by LADB and others. These specialized regional databases will be examined in detail shortly.

Looking at the business search results, Information Access Company's Trade and Industry Index, PTS Newsletter Database and PROMPT are all closely matched near the top. This is natural since the search was for news about a specific company, where these files excel, but the results should be extrapolated with care. A search on a more general business topic (e.g., privatization) would produce more hits in files like ABI/INFORM, which focus on news about broader trends.

Another somewhat deceptive result is the low ranking for EIU: Business International. In fact, this file has a unique role and use in international business searchig. The annual Country Profiles and quarterly Country Reports provide what amount to concise executive briefings on key subjects, like foreign trade, monetary policy and political events. The weekly, full-text journal Business Latin America covers business news often missed elsewhere.

Turning to the business coverage of the newswires, TEXTLINE once again appears in the top rank, but Knight-Ridder/Tribune Busines News dramatically moves forward to second place, eclipsing AP, Reuters and UPI on this particular search.

Among the full-text newspapers, the Journal of Commerce and Financial Times have substantially more business citations than the major dailies. The Houston Chronicle's high rank reflects the importance of the oil industry to the local economy. A search on telecommunications would have produced different results.

The results for the bibliographic news databases confirm the broad scope of INFO-SOUTH, which once again has the highest number of hits.

Interpret With Care

Viewed as a whole, these tables give a reasonably good sense of the different files, but the results must be interpreted with care. The total number of hits can be quite deceptive as a measure of a file's useful information becayse of the enormous amount of redundancy that exists.

Newswires, and to a lesser degree newspapers, often carry three or four versions of the same story; 12 hits in these files may only reflect three or four underlying articles. Equally, T&I, PROMT, ABI and other business databases all index and abstract many of the same periodicals. A single article is often responsible for five or six hits in a DIALOG OneSearch of these files.

Moreover, since most news organizations and business periodicals have a similar definition of what constitutes news, a few events often receive extensive coverage while others are ignored. A dramatic event, like an attempted coup in Venezuela, will generate a deluge of stories in every news database for three or four days. Most will repeat almost identical information. Then, for the rest of the year there will be no coverage at all.

This highlights the importance of databases that tap fresh sources of information, and particularly sources from the region itself. A searcher looking for general background information on the important Mexican ecological organization, the Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100), for example, would find that of 21 hits on the name, four were versions of a single article from Reuters, two articles in PROMPT were repeats of the same articles in PTS Newsletter Database and most of the remaining articles mentioned the group in relation to a single protest over a toxic dump on the Texas border. In contrast, the two most useful articles both came from INFO-SOUTH. One presented the group's key position paper and another covered its role in a Latin American ecological alliance.

Latin American Information on Other Services

Comparisons between DIALOG and services like NEXIS or Dow Jones News/Retrieval, and between the PTS Newsletter file on DIALOG and similar newsletter databases, like NewsNet, or Data Times are not usually clear cut. Each service generally reveals different areas of strength and weakness.

In this case, however, the most important conclusion can be clearly stated. Aside from two well-known exceptions--the full text of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times--other online services have few sources of information on Latin America that cannot also be found on DIALOG.

In the case of Dow Jones News/ Retrieval this is easy to observe. Aside from the full text of the Wall Street Journal and Barrons (and bureau reports that do not make the papeer itself) the information in the Dow Jones Text Library comes from several well-known online database producers who also make their data available on other services. The key data providers, DataTimes, Information Access Company, McGraw-Hill publications, PR Newswire and several full-text newspapers and magazines, make their files available on DIALOG as well as on Dow Jones and elsewhere.

The situation is similar with Mead Data Central's LEXIS/NEXIS. Aside from the full text of the New York Times, which Mead holds exclusively, the files in Mead's North/South America Library include newspapers, magazines, and wire services that can be found in DIALOG files, like PAPERS, Magazine ASAP, PTS Newsletter Database, and Newswire ASAP.

LEXIS/NEXIS has several useful databases, like Ethnic Newswatch, which DIALOG does not, but all the other services lack a number of DIALOG's key resources for Latin American information. The two most important are the University of Miami's INFO-SOUTH and the full text of the Miami Herald. For many searches, these two databases provide indispensable data.

This is reflected in a comparison between the hits on DIALOG and LEXIS/NEXIS on the political search terms above. On Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, for example, DIALOG had 2,393 hits versus 1,887 on LEXIS/NEXIS. On Rodrigo Borja, it was 2,543 versus 1,986. Even after removing duplicates, there was still a higher number of hits on DIALOG, most of them attributed to INFO-SOUTH and the Miami Herald.

In regard to newsletters, there are three key databases: PTS Newsletter Database, NewsNet and DataTimes. These databases are particularly important for coverage of Latin America because there are few general circulation U.S. magazines or newspapers specifically focused on the subject. Small circulation newsletters fill the information gap.

Table 3 lists the Latin American newsletters available on the three major databases. As the table indicates, PTS clearly offers the most extensive selection.

Specialized Latin American Databases

There are four major databases specifically focused on Latin America. Surprisingly, there is relatively little overlap. Each has a distinct focus, area of concentration and format.

INFO-SOUTH

INFO-SOUTH, produced by the University of Miami's North South Center, in conjunction with the Graduate School of International Studies and Institute of Interamerican Studies, is a bibliographic database offering citations and 50-100 word abstracts of articles selected from a range of newspapers, magazines and journals.

What makes INFO-SOUTH unique is the quality of its source publications. The heart of the file is 64 Spanish and Portugese language newspapers and magazines from 22 Latin American countries. These include leading daily papers and weekly news magazines that are not available anywhere else online.

These sources provide not only additional facts, but a broader focus and perspective. The Mexican weekly magazine, Processo, for example, provides frequent investigative reports, particularly on the backroom deals and financial dealings of Mexico's political and financial elite. A single article of this kind can often offer more insight into events than 20 or 30 conventional new stories.

These key sources are supplemented with citations drawn from 154" core" journals, most with a specifically Latin focus, and roughly 1,400 sources indexed in Current Contents. The database now contains some 65,000 abstracts; 10,000-12,000 records are added annually.

The database has a very clear and disciplined focus on "issues vital to U.S. national interests and policy goals . . . Emphasis is on trade, investment, debt, politics, democratization, drugs and the environment." In part, this reflects the Congressional funding that supports the database and the needs of the 88 U.S. Government agencies that receive the service free of charge.

But this focus also reflects a strong belief that a clear focus and area of specialization make the database more useful than an attempt to achieve too many competing goals. As Deborah Farrell, INFO-SOUTH's recently retired director said:

"We realized that we could not do everything. Our primary goal was to go `in country' to get key Latin American newspapers and magazines and make them available to U.S. researchers. But abstracting is very labor intensive and we felt it was more important, and more in tune with our customers wishes, to focus that scarce resource on news about broad trends and important issues."

This does limit the database's role as a source of business information. Business news is covered, but only if it has some national or international significance. General purpose business files (e.g., PROMT, T&I) will often have more citations to second tier companies.

Two features of INFO-SOUTH deserve note. Article titles are indexed in both English and Spanish, making it possible to search in the language that offers the most precise retrieval. Since the names of many Latin American political parties, organizations and common journalistic phrases frequently have as many as five different English translations, this is a more important feature than might first appear. For similar reasons, acronyms, widely used in Latin America, are indexed along with full names and titles where ever possible.

One peculiarity of INFO-SOUTH is the two-stage process by which records are added to the database. Titles and indexing are loaded within several days of publication but abstracts and full descriptors lag by several weeks. Some problems and confusion can arise when searchers fail to bear this in mind 2.

INFO-SOUTH offers document delivery for all citations and provides several options for the current awareness service. A thesaurus, user's manual and toll-free help desk are available. Along with access through DIALOG, the database is also available through direct subscription, on CD-ROM and in print.

INFO-SOUTH's current plans include a statistical database offering IMF data on Latin America and a WHO's WHO directory database with information on noteworthy Latin American individuals, organizations and businesses. Both should be available by the fall of 1993.

The Latin America Data Base

The Latin America Data Base (LADB), the second key source of specialized online information, shares one characteristic with INFO-SOUTH. It is closely affiliated with an academic institution--the University of New Mexico and its Latin American Institute.

In other respects, however, the two are strikingly different. INFO-SOUTH is a traditional bibliographic database while LADB describes itself as "an electronic news publisher"--one whose stories happen to appear online.

LADB produces three weekly full-text publications that generally run about eight to ten single-spaced pages.

Roma Arellano, LADB's Program Manager, expresses the organization's approach quite clearly.

"We distinguish ourselves from other U.S. news media first, and other database producers second. Our publications provide news coverage on topics that are under-reported or inadequately treated by other news media. We rely on journalists and scholars who have lived and worked in the region, and we make use of more diverse sources than other media in our reporting. In addition to international wire services, we monitor international radio broadcasts, key Latin American newspapers and reports from both official organizations and non-governmental watchdog/advocacy groups."

In fact, LADB publications resemble newsletters and newswire in many other respects. They do not have abstracts or descriptors, and must be searched using the same free-text techniques required for files like AP and UPI. (LADB has several publications that help searchers translate common indexing terms into free-text format.) LADB's style is also firmly journalistic rather than academic.

The three LADB publications are available on all the major online services. In addition to the PTS Newsletter Database on DIALOG, they can be found on Mead, Data-Star, Dow Jones News/Retrieval, NewsNet and BRS. Hispanic American Periodicals Index

Both INFO-SOUTH and LADB are used in many universities, but they are not primarily intended for scholars. The online versions of The Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) and the Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS), in contrast, are primarily aimed at the community of Latin American specialists in academia.

The Hispanic American Periodicals Index has been produced by the UCLA Latin American Center in print format since 1970. In 1991 it was brought online as part of UCLA's online library catalog system, ORION.

HAPI indexes artices about Latin America in Some 400 scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. Recently, ten business-oriented journals have been added. The database now contains over 176,000 records and is increasing by roughly 9,000 items per year. The database can be searched by Author, Title, Subject, Journal Name and several other fields. A variety of Boolean operators are available and cross field searches are allowed.

For business or journalism, the real value of HAPI lies in the convenient access it provides to social science research on Latin America that is frequently underutilized or ignored. Anthropological field studies, for example, often provide detailed information on political attitudes, social conditions, and economic trends that cannot be found anywhere else.

As Barbara Valk, the director of HAPI noted:

"Our objective is to cover the most important journals in a wide variety of disciplines. Our primary criteria for including a journal is the overall value of the research it publishes, but we also strive for a balance between different viewpoints and to include journals from all regions of Latin America."

The subject headings used in the HAPI database are more precise and restrictive than the descriptors common in other DIALOG files and make the extensive Theasurus and Name Authority and indispensable search aid. HAPI also produces a brief user's guide and offers telephone support and document delivery for many items.

HAPI can be accessed online via the Internet and RLIN. There are several payment options including a $40 per hour "pay as you go" plan or $800 per year for unlimited usage. A subscription also allows the user access to UCLA's online catalog and a number of specialized databases at the university.

Handbook Of Latin American Studies

The Handbook of Latin American Studies is produced by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. The Division, which provides reference services to Congress, the Government and the public, has produced a print version of the Handbook annually since 1939. The Handbook contains bibliographic citations and short commentaries on a carefully selected set of each year's books and articles in the social sciences and humanities

The production of the Handbook became totally automated with the 50th annual edition in 1991 and Library of Congress patrons were permitted to access it from terminals in the library soon after. In March of 1993, as part of the Congressionally-mandated opening of the Library's resources to Internet access, the Handbook became available online.

The online version now contains 41,000 bibliographic records and is growing by about 8,000 items per year. Records in the Handbook can be searched by author, title, subject, series statement and certain field notes with Boolean operators and commends.

The unique value and importance of the database, however, lies in the critical comments of 50-100 words that are added to selected bibliographic records each year. Over 130 scholars collaborate on the preparation of some 5,000 of these annotations per year. They now represent over 20,000 online records.

Search aids are currently in development and access through RLIN is also planned. The Hispanic Division's future goal is to get the first 49 volumes of the Handbook into machine-readable format using scanning and OCR technologies.

The Library has not yet appointed a full-time staff person to coordinate Internet access to the Library's resources. But as Sue Mundell, Senior Assistant to the Editor of the Handbook, notes:

There is a real commitment to electronic access and dissemination of the Library's resources within the organization and, while there may be some lags, I'm confident that full and reasonably convenient online access to the Handbook will come about at a fairly rapid rate.

Other Options

It should also be noted that all four of these databases, INFO- SOUTH, LADB, HAPI and the Handbook of Latin American Studies, are now also available on two CD-ROMs produced by the National Information Services Corporation of Baltimore, Maryland. The annual subscription price is $1195 per disc.

There are a number of other, more limited U.S. databases that cover Latin America. Two can be noted in passing. BORDERBASE, developed by the Institute for Manufacturing and Materials Management at the University of Texas, El Paso provides statistical data regarding the four U.S. and six Mexican border states, as well as the Maquiladora industry. Delphi En Espanol, produced by Innovative Telematics of Miami Beach, provides feeds from a number of regional Spanish language newswires not available elsewhere.

Viewed as a whole, there are substantial online resources for U.S. information professionals to explore. As the economic and political importance of Latin America grows there will also be an increasing demand for more detailed and up-to-date information.

The area a fairly large number of files, newsgroups and electronic conference on the Internet that deal with Latin America but they are not generally information sources like those available on DIALOG and other commercial services. As Molly Molloy, a rererence librarian at New Mexico State University and author of an article on Latin America Internet resources notes:

"It is better to view the curent Internet as a source for current awareness rather than as a source of historical or social science data. Many of the existing conferences and forums contain many person to person messages and discussins. Often, these contain valuable information about events in the news but rarely structured data and information. I really view the Internet primarily as a new form of communication among the diverse groups involved with Latin America."

There are three basic kinds of Internet resources available. BITNET and Usenet conferences and newsgroups about particular Latin American countries, specialized Latin American discussion groups conducted by librarians, academic and database producers, and general purpose listings on Internet files and conferences.

In the first category, there are Usenet newsgroups under the general grouping "so.culture." for Latin America, Mexico, Argentina, the Caribbean and other related areas. There are similar BITNET listservs for Argentina, Chile, Ecuador,Peru, and Mexico. The individual groups vary widely in content and quality, but the Usenet newsgroups often tend to be more "chatty" than the listservs.

In the second category three discussion groups stand out:

Finally, Diane Kovacs' (and others) Directory of Scholarly Electronic Conferences and Arthur McGee's list of African, African-American and Latin Internet files are two key "lists of lists." UT-LANIC is a specialized Internet Gopher now under development (at the University of Texas--Latin American Network Information Center, at Austin, Texas). When complete, UT-LANIC will provide an overview of Internet resources on Latin America (telnet utlanic.utexas.edu, login: lanic).

REFERENCES

1 Sawyer, Matt. "How to Find Latin American Information on DIALOG." Training Manual, Dialog Information Services, December 1992, pp. 1-3.

2 Durniak, Barbara Ammerman. "Latin American Information Online: Info-South." ONLINE 15, No. 6 (November 1991): pp. 67-68.

3 O'Leary, Mick. "INFO-SOUTH fills Foreign Data Gap." Information Today 9, No. 6 (June 1992): pp. 13-14.

4 Hernandez Jr., Nicolas. "Latin American Databases: Technological Resources for Scholars in the 90's." Paper delivered at the CALICO conference held at the College of William and Mary, March 11-13, 1993.

5 Colson, Harold. "Latin America Online: Business and Current Affairs" In Conference Proceedings ONLINE/CD-ROM '91, pp. 40-43.

6 Mundell, Sue. "Electronic Dissemination of the Handbook of Latin American Studies: Present and Future." Paper presented at the North South Online Information Meeting ONLINE '93. Mexico City, March 15-19, 1993.