PANA (Pan-American Authorities Project)

Background

The PANA (Pan-American Authorities Project) is an effort started by the University of Florida Libraries and Angibel Soto, former Bilingual Metadata Specialist, to create sustainable Spanish subject terms that reflected the diversity of dialects and terms across the Spanish-speaking world.

In November 2021, Soto reached out to Theresa Polk, Head of Digital Initiatives at LLILAS Benson, and Devon Murphy, currently Metadata Analyst, to encourage them to join the project. Previous work in assigning Spanish subject headings to UTL materials were sporadic and relied on US or Spain-based resources, thus not always applicable to users. Beginning in January 2022, staff and students within LLILAS Benson Digital Initiatives, alongside the Metadata Analyst, drafted a pilot program to follow the PANA Workflow. Terms were derived from recently ingested and in-progress digital collections (Prensa Obrera, Arturo Taracena Revolution and Counter Revolution in Guatemala, Field Notes, and "Archiving the Central American Revolutions" Micro Oral Histories.)

Following a second pilot in Spring 2022, the project is now being integrated into existing metadata workflows.