A special information infrastructure provides all members of Mecila with the necessary research literature and relevant information sources, as independently of time and place as possible.

This information infrastructure is coordinated by the IAI together with the Daniel Cosió Villegas Library (COLMEX), the library of the Institute of Brazilian Studies (USP), and the Professor Guillermo Obiols Library (Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación/IdIHCS, UNLP) in Argentina.

The IAI provides all Mecila researchers with access to all its holdings. If they have specific literature needs that go beyond the library’s holdings, the IAI acquires the corresponding media with its own funds, if possible in electronic form, and makes it accessible to Mecila’s researchers via the Online Catalog of the IAI library or the discovery system IberoSearch.

The copyright-free publications digitised by the IAI are generally freely available via the IAI’s Digital Collections.

Publications that are not yet copyright-free in a licensable electronic version are also made accessible to Mecila’s investigators.

Mecila’s partner institutions exchange physical publications whenever possible. The Institute of Brazilian Studies provides a library reading room where Mecila scholars can work with these materials whenever they conduct research at the Centre’s hub in São Paulo. This will also be possible at Mecila’s nodes in Berlin, La Plata, and Mexico City.

The IAI has an electronic reading room for Mecila, which grants limited access to copyrighted publications in accordance with German copyright law. Active Mecila investigators can access publications of high relevance for the entire project in the form of scanned image files in the electronic reading room.

For more information, please contact: mecila.library@iai.spk-berlin.de