In the final decades of the last century and to the present day, archival science and practice have had an unusual rise; this is mainly due to two factors:

1) The great development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which has generated enormous amounts of information, produced, stored, transmitted and distributed mainly in digital form. The high power of the current computer equipment, the countless programs and applications, the wide capacity and the very low price of the contemporary storage devices, as well as the facilities and the ubiquity of the world-wide network allow to create, store, distribute and consume information in an easier and faster way. Among all this information are the archives of organizations, mainly those in the public sector.

2) The change in the function and social significance of archives in recent years has manifested itself in the great global growth in demand by citizens for access to public information. This has led to countless policies, initiatives, legislation, organizations, etc. worldwide, on issues such as the right to information, access to public information, transparency, accountability, citizen participation and, more recently, open government.

These two factors -Not being the only ones- have had an unprecedented impact on the production, management, preservation and demand for information, especially governmental information, which is based primarily on records and archives from the organizations in that sector. Because of this, in the last decades of the past century and the time running from the current one, science and archival practice have experienced an unusual boom, which is why this science has had to develop new paradigms, theories, practices, concepts, guidelines, etc., to be able to keep up to date and contend with this situation. Like other information sciences, archival science had to be profoundly updated and rewritten; its progress and development over the last three decades are impressive. As a result, numerous documents can be clearly found in the literature on the subject. These texts reflect emerging issues and advances, and through them the development of science and archival practice can be followed. However, studies and revisions have been done primarily in the Anglo-Saxon world with texts written in English; comparatively, production has been lower in the Ibero-American region, where texts are produced predominantly in Spanish and Portuguese.

The specialized sites in journals and texts within the region: Scielo, Redalyc, the CSIC ISOC database, etc., recover -in regard to the existing total- very few archival science documents. Partly because those sites lack many of them and partly because their search engines for subject retrieval are very elementary and their indexing is very poor. In addition, the texts of science and archival practice are usually mixed up with those of historiography or eminently historical fonds, which makes it difficult to find, study and separate the archival ones. To make things worse, the existing compilations always include translations into Spanish and Portuguese from texts originated outside the region. For all of the above, this is an extremely wide area of opportunity in the region.

The original archival publishing of Latin America is still far from the standards of other more advanced regions of the planet, but it is not incipient, it is well established, it has tradition, variety, infrastructure and has been certainly increasing. A clear development can be observed in all possible areas. For this reason it is advisable to promote it in the understanding that it does start from a minimum, yet sufficient base. Ibero-American archival publishing is consistent in quantity and quality with the development of science and archival practice in the region. Its strength is the already existing infrastructure and the documents and knowledge already accumulated, which are not few.

Its main weakness does not consist in the lack of original published information; it does exist, but it is not properly recorded or systematized. Efforts to record and compile it are incomplete, outdated and isolated at the regional level. There is no standardization among records from various sources. Therefore, it is extremely important to index, classify and normalize them properly to maximize their recovery, which is currently totally deficient. It is also necessary to register them integrally in order to make also available the full texts, both current and retrospective, in order to be able to study, revise and analyze what has been published in a coherent, systematic and integral manner, beyond the study of simple bibliographic records. All this gathered in one place and obviously with online access.

Consequently, this repository contains a unique set of information about the region; it aims to fill that lack of recording and systematization of the Ibero-American archival bibliography and pretends to serve as a basis for more and better compilations in this regard.

Mexican National Archives
Mexico City
Mexico