Puerto Rican Endowment for the Humanities renews its Enciclopedia PR
The Puerto Rican Endowment for the Humanities launched its renewed Enciclopedia PR, an online reference and general education resource on the society, history, and culture of Puerto Rico.
This free access publication, available at enciclopediapr.org, has more than 1,300 texts in Spanish, with revised English versions to be incorporated in the upcoming weeks. Its comprehensive content includes biographies of prominent Puerto Rican figures, such as actor Benicio del Toro and composer Catalino “Tite” Curet Alonso; essays and keynotes by Humanists of the Year such as Luce López-Baralt and Luis Rafael Sánchez; as well as reference articles on Puerto Rico’s arts, popular culture, science, sports, diaspora, history, government, and public health, among many other topics, the Endowment said.
Endowment officials said the entity is “committed to the sustained growth of the project, which includes continuing to update and expand its contents; the reincorporation of sound and video components with optimized quality; and the integration of new accessibility tools.”
“To be effective, an educational project like this must be updated, renewed, and expanded towards new themes, approaches and audiences. For example, adding to the traditional humanistic disciplines the necessary dialogue between the sciences and the humanities; and diversifying the reflection on the changing factors that affect our circumstances. We dedicated a good part of 2020 to this great task,” said Margarita Benítez, executive director of the Endowment.
Among the outstanding aspects of the new Enciclopedia PR are its graphic and technological transformation, which enables a more user-friendly experience for the reader and easy navigation from various types of devices, an essential requirement today. Essential aspects for an online encyclopedia have been incorporated, such as tags, an improved search tool, and accessibility functions for users with special needs.
Its new content features a section on public health, which includes articles on topics of current interest, such as the pandemic from a historical perspective. Each revised article now has bibliographic records and references from additional sources that validate the rigor of the contents and provide guides to the reader interested in continuing to investigate.
