History of HAPI

It all began at Arizona State University in the early 1970s when Barbara Valk founded HAPI as an annual printed index of academic journal citations on Latin America (although HAPI includes articles dating back to the late 1960s following an early retrospective indexing project). In 1976, HAPI became part of UCLA's Latin American Institute - at the time called the Latin American Center. HAPI is a nonprofit and is self-supporting through our subscription income.

HAPI debuted on the Internet in 1997, while still producing our annual print edition until 2008. The HAPI staff includes a small team of librarians responsible for production of HAPI's records. Our dedicated team of volunteer indexers, many drawn from the membership of the Latin Americanist librarian organization SALALM, provides essential assistance in indexing our journals. Together we add approximately 7,000 new records every year.

In 2006, HAPI launched Spanish and Portuguese versions of our English-language site. In 2014, Spanish and Portuguese versions of the HAPI Subject Headings were added to improve usability for our Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking users. More recently, in the fall of 2017, we began adding abstracts to HAPI.

Find out more about HAPI's history in Barbara Valk's "Cooperation in the Publication of Basic Bibliographic Works: The Hispanic American Periodicals Index," Latin American Research Review, 12:3 (1977) 161-63; and "HAPI and SALALM: Thirty Years of Close Cooperation," SALALM Papers, vol. 50 (2005) 9-15; and Orchid Mazurkiewicz's "The Hispanic American Periodical Index," Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Latin American History, 2016.