There was a period when a professor could decide that an entire field needed a better Internet resource and then just start building one by hand.
Visit LatinAmericanStudies.org
Historian Antonio de la Cova created LatinAmericanStudies.org in 1997 as an online research resource for Latin American and Latino studies.
By 2004, an Indiana University article reported that the site had grown to more than 35,000 links and nearly six gigabytes of material. That was not a university library project with a development team. It was a professor-maintained website.
The difference shows.
The site is organized less like a modern academic portal and more like an enormous research desk that kept expanding whenever another useful source appeared.
The Web as a working archive
The material ranges across Latin American history, Cuba, U.S.-Cuba relations, political movements, immigration, military history, historical figures, scanned documents, newspaper articles, photographs, academic papers, government records, and oral-history material.
One particularly valuable section preserves Cuban oral-history interviews from 1974 through 2004, including audio and transcripts. Other pages assemble U.S.-Cuba documents decade by decade or preserve historical images alongside contemporary records.
The site is not neutral in the sense of being an anonymous institutional database. De la Cova’s own biography, Cuban exile experience, research interests, interviews, and political perspective are plainly part of the project.
That actually makes it a better example of the old academic Web.
Personal scholarly sites often exposed the researcher as well as the research. You could see what one historian considered worth saving, which documents he linked together, what he digitized, and which events he treated as central.
Modern academic platforms tend to separate publications, institutional profiles, archives, course pages, and personal history into different systems. LatinAmericanStudies.org piles them into one giant navigable body of material.
That design can be awkward. It is also extraordinarily revealing.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of specialist sites where one obsessive maintainer did the work that a later institution might call a digital-humanities initiative.
This one actually became a major reference resource while still looking like somebody’s enormous hand-built website.
In 1997, that was not a contradiction.
It was the model.