An Archivist and an Anthropologist walk into a Book Fair: planning a first-time trip to the Feria Internacional del Libro in Guadalajara, Mexico
Abstract
Natalie Baur and Martin Tsang are colleagues at the University of Miami Libraries and will be attending the Guadalajara International Book Fair (Feria Internacional del Libro Guadalajara) this November for the first time with the ALA-FIL Free Pass Program. The Free Pass program is awarded to librarians who work in the area of Spanish language acquisitions and/or are working to build their Spanish language collection to better serve their community and users. In this article, Baur and Tsang outline their motivations for attending the book fair and the kinds of takeaways they are looking forward to from attending the book fair, both for personal professional development and for future new collaborations at the institutional level at their home library.
An Archivist at the Feria Internacional del Libro Guadalajara
Natalie Baur, M.A., M.L.S.
As an archivist, many raised their brows when I expressed my interest in attending the 2015 International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Feria Internacional del Librio, or FIL as it is widely known, is the largest book fair venue for Spanish-language publications in the world, with more than 1,900 vendors selling unique and hard-to-find publications in one spot.[1] So why would an archivist like myself want to attend the FIL in Mexico? I work at the University of Miami Libraries in Coral Gables, Florida, where we have a large number of Spanish-language holdings. Many faculty members and students work on research requiring the use of publications in Spanish and from publishers in Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean. Although my main area of work is managing the archival holdings at the Cuban Heritage Collection, I am also interested in and involved with the whole information landscape: from rare manuscripts and archival materials, to books, databases, and digital collections that support primary and secondary research. I saw attending the FIL with my fellow University of Miami colleague and subject selector, Martin Tsang, as a way to contribute my skill set and interests to the collecting efforts and student and faculty support at my library.
In the spring of 2015, I learned I was awarded a Fulbright-García Robles grant to study digital preservation and information access in Mexico at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México during the 201-2016 academic year. My institution has been very supportive about my project and interested in the ways I could continue to collaborate with the library even while on leave. Attending the book fair was a logical way to network with Mexican colleagues all the while continuing to stay in touch with and contribute to my home institution. The FIL is not just a place to purchase books; there is a full slate of cultural programming, professional talks and presentations, and vendor demonstrations. It is a chance to purchase materials for our collections we might not otherwise have the chance to buy, and also a fantastic opportunity to meet new people and network face-to-face in a way we often don’t have time for even in our hyper-connected digital world. I am particularly interested in this event as a way to expand my network of Mexican colleagues, which comes at a crucial early stage of my research project. The connections and synergies between projects and others’ work isn’t often readily apparent until you meet in person and can talk through new ideas, hunches, and shared experiences; I see the FIL as a perfect opportunity to do just that.
Our attendance at the FIL in Guadalajara will be a first for our institution, and the library leadership supported our applications as first-time attendees to the American Library Association-Feria Internacional del Libro Free Pass Program. We were fortunate to be selected as Free Pass participants, and we are looking forward to the unique opportunity to network with other first-time attendees, seasoned FIL veterans, and vendors as part of the Free Pass program. This will be a new experience for both of us, and we are approaching this experience as a way to learn about book buying trips. We plan on preparing by participating in meetings with other subject selectors, acquisitions librarians, and library leadership to work out ways to avoid duplicating purchases on our approval plans with existing vendors, finding solutions for shipping books back to Miami, and documenting our experience so that our colleagues interested in similar buying trips will have something to build upon.
An Anthropologist at the Feria Internacional del Libro Guadalajara
Martin A. Tsang, Ph.D.
As an anthropologist and the newly appointed Council on Libraries and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Area studies at the University of Miami Libraries, I will be approaching the FIL with several interdisciplinary hats stashed in my tote. In one measure, I will be attending FIL to seek the physical resources that will complement the University of Miami Libraries in many key areas, especially for our collections that span the interdisciplinary needs of Latin American studies, and the departments of History, religious Studies, and Modern Languages. I will be seeking niche and more ephemeral materials that we may not have access to through our usual acquisition avenues. These may include chapbooks, poetry, and audiovisual materials that you can only get your hands on by traveling.
In addition to developing our collections, I am also interested in attending FIL from an ethnographic perspective, given my social science background. My own work focuses on Chinese presence in the Caribbean and Latin America. I have conducted research on Hakka (an ethnic Chinese population) migrants, who from 1847 have influenced Cuban culture and religions in surprising ways. I am interested in how the Caribbean and the Americas have been constructed in terms of identity, resistance, and mixing. I am excited that FIL will give me a hands-on opportunity to observe and participate in the dissemination of knowledge in a variety of languages as pursued by a variety of disciplines and scholars. I expect it to be very different in some ways from book expos held in North America and Europe and to also have interesting parallels. I will not only be delivering books from this trip but also report to our library faculty on the unique experiences of conducting business and networking in person. As people are the currency in anthropology, I foresee FIL to be an excellent bridge and connection building exercise with vendors, scholars and other libraries, not possible to forge without face-to-face contact. The University of Miami Libraries is excited to see, as am I, just what will happen at the fair, and what the less tangible takeaways will be.
I will definitely be utilizing my time to make new contacts and look for potential areas for collaboration on future library projects that focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. I will be speaking to many attendees to ascertain how they perceive their FIL experiences and, along with Natalie Baur and other colleagues, to make this trip a useful one for professional development just as much as collections development. I look forward to surprising my department with the unique finds that I will bring back, one way or another, from Guadalajara. One request from colleagues is to report back on the food I encounter – coincidentally University of Miami Libraries recently hosted an exhibition of Cuban and Caribbean cooking and recipe books – and not that I need such corroboration to oblige, I will happily and selflessly pursue that line of investigation.
References
“About Us” Feria Internacional del Libro Guadalajara website. https://www.fil.com.mx/ingles/i_info/i_info_somos.asp. Accessed 11 August, 2015.
About the authors
Natalie Baur is Archivist, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries
Martin Tsang is CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Area Studies, University of Miami Libraries