The Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC) is an international non-profit organization that aims to build cooperation bridges among educational institutions, government organizations and companies to drive training and knowledge sharing. This consortium was born in 1990, when in an effort to improve international cooperation in science and technology, staff from the University of New Mexico visited Latin American countries. Afterwards, a series of meetings with personnel from the different governments, research and educational institutions as well as commercial firms, helped draw a profile of the situation in these areas.

As a result of these visits, a meeting was held in December 1990 in the city of Albuquerque, reaching the conclusion that traditional cooperation mechanisms were insufficient, and therefore, more effective paradigms were needed. The Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC) was then established by means of a Memorandum of Understanding, specifying the goals of the Consortium. The main hurdles to progress in education and research in Latin America were also clearly identified.
Some of the problems were further aggravated by the simultaneous occurrence. The participants agreed that more effective cooperation mechanisms should be created and thus multiple projects that have been carried out over these years were outlined to bridge the gap in education and research in different countries. To achieve this, four general initiatives were undertaken to find solutions to existing problems:

1. Library Linkage (Liblink): An initiative with the initial aim to enable an agile exchange of existing bibliographic collections in the libraries of the member institutions in order to meet the need for bibliographic information.
2. Advanced Continuing Education (ACE): It aims to provide training, updating and/or specialization to human resources of institutions, focusing on distance learning as a tool to meet training needs in geographically scattered contexts.
3. Research and Development (R&D): An initiative created to support the processes of education and advanced research in Science, Technology and Innovation. It undertakes activities to streamline research and joint development among ISTEC institutions and update laboratories and research centers.
4. Los Libertadores: Devoted to creating and driving cooperation in inter/multi/transdisciplinary and interconnected centers of excellence, it aims to meet the great challenges of today that are no longer restricted to one country or regional, but have a global reach. Likewise, its goal is to strengthen horizontal cooperation among countries, helping in the design of centers of excellence to boost the most important areas for each institution and each region.

The Library Linkage project is an ambitious initiative promoted by the ISTEC with technological support by the UNLP, Argentina. The initiative began in 1993 under the leadership of several Brazilian libraries, especially, the University of Campinas, mainly focusing on information management and sharing through various projects. This goal was later achieved through the free exchange of documents within a network of cooperating libraries of academic institutions which were members of ISTEC and the outstanding generation of the International Symposium on Digital Libraries (Simposio Internacional de Bibliotecas Digitales, SIBD) that was launched in 2005.

In 1999 Liblink attends the meeting held in the Santa Fe, Albuquerque to support the Open Access Initiative and endorse with the signature of its representatives the call for a new scientific communication system. In this meeting, the organizational principles and the technological bases were established to enable different and interoperable archiving systems. The consortium’s commitment to Open Access also translated in its support to the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations project (NDLTD).
ISTEC fosters cooperation in R&D&I among academic institutions, industry members and government organizations and acts as a catalyst for socio-economic growth throughout Latin America to deliver its ultimate goal, a more equitable society. The LibLink initiative clearly illustrates the type of collaborative work which can be undertaken by institutions for the common good. Over the years, LibLink has evolved and expanded its scope of action, from an initiative devoted to enabling bibliographic exchange towards a catalyst for multiple projects aimed at giving visibility to the production of the institutions, joining efforts to expand access to knowledge, and to help ensure equality of opportunities in Latin America. The advancement of technologies has set the pace of this continuous evolution, and this will only grow in the future, as more institutions get involved in the projects, with new ideas, tools and services emerging from the new generations.

For more information about ISTEC’s Liblink Initiative, reference, and future projects, click here.