This year's Dan C. Hazen SALALM Fellowship Award (external link, opens in a new window) goes to Ricarda Musser, head of the Media Department at the Library of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (IAI), for her project Compilation of an Annotated Bibliography of Latin American Children's Magazines. A comprehensively annotated bibliography of Latin American children’s magazines has not yet been published.
Children’s Magazines as a Subject of Research
While children’s books in Latin America are gaining increasing importance as a subject of research, there are as yet only a few studies that specifically address children’s magazines and their contribution to education and (democratic) upbringing. The few existing studies are limited to individual magazines. The difficulty in accessing the material — which rarely found its way into academic libraries and disappeared from public libraries as soon as it was no longer current — could be one of the main reasons why these publications have received so little attention to date. Even comprehensive bibliographies of historical magazines in various Latin American countries tend to touch on children’s magazines only in passing.
Children’s Magazines in the IAI Collections
Over the past two decades, the IAI Library has systematically expanded its collections of historical periodicals — including children’s magazines — from Latin America and the Caribbean. The rationale for these acquisitions was not always the specific target audience, but also the contributions of outstanding graphic artists and writers or the particular social significance of individual titles. Many of these magazines are held exclusively by the IAI in Germany — or even in all of Europe. Some titles have already been digitized at the IAI and are available for use nationwide and from anywhere.
The project supported by the Dan C. Hazen SALALM Fellowship Award
The annotated bibliography being compiled thanks to SALALM’s (external link, opens in a new window) support will cover children’s magazines from Latin America and the Caribbean from the 19th century through the 1950s — a period of upheaval in leisure activities marked by the advent of television. This will be based on the IAI’s Collections, research in various catalogs and databases, and a research trip to the Spanish National Library ( Biblioteca Nacional de España (external link, opens in a new window) ) in Madrid. The results produced during the project period from July 2026 to July 2027 will be presented as part of a Dan C. Hazen panel at one of the upcoming SALALM conferences.
The bibliography will be made available via open access through the portal of the Specialized Information Service for Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino Studies (external link, opens in a new window). In collaboration with researchers and librarians from other knowledge archives, the bibliography will be expanded in terms of both content and time frame beyond the project period, thereby becoming a dynamic tool for research.
