Cooperative cataloging and primary sources

proposing a debate based on the LACLI Project experience

Abstract

This article explores the LACLI - Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latinx, and Iberian Online Free E-Resources project, an international collaborative initiative that aims to create a referential repository of free and open-access online resources about Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula. Led by the Latin America North East Libraries Consortium (LANE), the project seeks to promote the depth and scope of informational collections and facilitate access to them, with the participation of institutions in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States that worked on identifying and cataloging sources. It discusses the country's historical lack of success in establishing effective systems, despite attempts implemented over time. It points out a gap in the transition to interoperability via Linked Open Data (LOD), which requires robust infrastructure, often absent in Brazilian institutions. It analyzes recent initiatives such as BDTD, Oasisbr, BrCris, and DIBRARQ, as important for academic-scientific information, but which do not fill the gap in the integrated referencing of primary online sources. It highlights the evolution of informational cooperation, from the Library of Alexandria to futuristic visions like the Memex, signaling how the web intensified the need for library cooperation. It cites successful international examples such as Europeana and WorldCat, which use Linked Open Data (LOD) to aggregate millions of items. It argues that the LACLI project, by focusing on the cataloging of digital primary sources, emerges as a modest but significant contribution to adapting the principles of cooperative cataloging to the Brazilian reality. It defends the initiative as a palliative measure for the discovery and access to these resources, promoting the visibility of informational heritage, overcoming the "informational debt," and reaffirming the importance of continuous collaboration for the advancement of knowledge.