Libraries Receive Panama Collection

The University of Cincinnati Libraries recently received a gift of 409 books by Panamanian authors. The collection, primarily in Spanish, includes novels, short stories, poetry, essays, history, and books about sociology and the construction of the Panama Canal. The collection is listed in the UC Library Catalog as “Panama Collection” or by searching “Panama Collection.”

The donation is a gift initiated by Enrique Jaramillo-Levi, a Panamanian writer who was a University of Cincinnati Charles Phelps Taft visiting scholar affiliated with the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Professor Jaramillo-Levi worked with the Universidad Tecnologica de Panama, the institution where he normally teaches, to mount a two-month campaign in Panama to elicit book donations from authors, local small press publishers, and cultural institutions. His purpose in doing this was “to help expand knowledge and to have at hand a useful bibliography about Panama – its culture, its writers – for the benefit of students, professors, and researchers at the University of Cincinnati,” said Jaramillo-Levi.

All 409 titles in the Panama Collection are unique to both the UC Library Catalog and to OhioLINK’s statewide catalog. Only a handful of libraries in the United States own any of these titles, making the Panama Collection an important addition to the UC Libraries’ Romance Languages and Literatures Collection and the Latin American Studies Collection.

Nicasio Urbina, UC Professor of Latin American Literature comments on the value of the recent gift:

This collection is a very important donation to the Libraries and
enhances our holdings in Panamanian literature and Panamanian
affairs. It brings up-to-date our collection with many titles published
in the last 10 years, dealing with a number of disciplines in the arts and
humanities, not only creative writing but literary criticism, history,
political sciences, anthropology, urban development, and cultural
criticism. I want to thank Professor Jaramillo-Levi for his generosity
and energy in negotiating this donation, and to highlight the
importance of the Taft Research Center and the Taft Research
Seminars, which facilitates this kind of interaction. This is a very
important collection for me personally and for my students interested
in Central American Studies.

For more information about the Panama Collection, contact Arlene Johnson, Subject Librarian for Romance Languages and Literature, at (513)556-1417 or at arlene.johnson@uc.edu, or Sally Moffit, Subject Librarian for Latin American Studies at (513)556-1860 or at sally.moffit@uc.edu.

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