Latin American
Data Base (LADB)

Includes Economies of Latin America Archive

 Coverage & Access:

LADB: Latin American Data Base is an archive of full-text articles on contemporary Latin America, including Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. News reports are synthesized from regional and international sources, mostly from newspaper reports and journal articles. Subjects covered include politics, economics, human rights, environment, drugs and military. Articles appear in English only. Coverage is from 1986 with quarterly updates.

LADB also includes access to the Economies of Latin America Archive, a full-text archive of selected Latin American economic publications. This database includes serials, reports, and working papers produced by governmental agencies, academic research institutes, and non-governmental organizations in approximately twenty countries in Latin America. Most articles are in Spanish. Coverage is 1994-present.

LADB is available on all networked workstations in the KU Libraries or from any computer connected to the campus network through a direct connection or a dial-up account. To access LADB from a networked library workstation, click Select Databases by Name and select it from the alphabetical list. From outside the library, use the Information Gateway link on the Libraries home page <http://www.lib.ku.edu/> or the Searchable Databases link on the SPLAT home page <http://www2.ku.edu/~splat/>.

To Search the LADB Archive:

• From the Archive search page, enter your search terms in the Word Search Box. You can choose whether to search the headlines only, the article text only, or both the headlines and the text (the default selection). After you have filled out your search form, click the Search button in the lower right-hand corner for your results.
• All of the Archive articles are in English. Spanish characters entered in the Word Search form will be converted to English characters by removing the accent or tilde. You may want to search in both Spanish and English, because search results may vary.
• You can join your words by using the connectors or and not. Combining terms with or means that either term may appear. Using not with a term will exclude that word from your search. The connector and is implied within your search.

To Search the Economies of Latin America Archive:

• Click the Econ Search button that appears on the bar at the top of the Archives page, or click the Search the Economic Journals text at the bottom of the Word Search form.
• Most of the articles are in Spanish. If you are searching in Spanish, you need to use Spanish accent marks and/or tildes on the letters. For instance, if you search for Mexico (instead of México) you should only expect to find the articles only in English. See the Help screens for additional tips on searching in Spanish.
• You may want to search in both Spanish and English, because search results may vary.
• To return to the main LADB Archive, click the Archive Search button that appears on the bar at the top of the page, or click the Search the LADB Archive text at the bottom of the Word Search form.

To Refine your search:

• Use quotation marks, to search for phrases.

• Use the Date boxes to narrow your search. For example, if you are searching for articles on a news incident that occurred in 1992, enter 1992-01-01 in the Articles After box and 1993-01-01 in the Article Before box. If you know the date of the article, use the Exact Date box.
• Use the Publications boxes to limit your search to one or several LABD publications. If no box is selected, LADB searches all the publications in the archive. (See the publications page for descriptions of LADB's titles.)
• Economies of Latin America Archive also allows you to refine your search by specifying an author, publication volume/number, and country.

To View Records:

• Search results appear as a list of the headlines of the articles found. They are ranked by date and by number of times your search criteria appeared in the article and/or headline. Your original search appears at the bottom of the list and allows you to change or refine your search terms.
• Click on the headline to read the articles.
• To select and retrieve articles, mark the box next to the articles you wish to retrieve. When you click the Fetch documents button all the articles selected will be retrieved into one file for viewing, downloading, printing or sending to an email address.

To Print, Download or E-mail Documents:

• Click on your browserâs Print button or pull down the File menu and select Print.
• We encourage you to download the results of your searches to your own disk for later printing on another computer printer (or uploading to your word processor). Insert a formatted disk into drive A. Pull down the File menu and select Save As. This will bring up a menu from which you may select disk A. Type a name for your file. You will need to include the .txt extension when naming your file. This will allow you to read it with any software that can read ASCII.
• To mail your search results to your e-mail address, click the File menu of your browser toolbar. Click on Mail document. Enter your e-mail address and click Send.

To Cite LADB Records:

• LADB's bulletins are copyrighted, but can be quoted or referred to without permission for standard academic and research work.