The Digital Library of Maranhense Literature, Portal Maranhão, a virtual environment for reading and studying literary texts, which provides information about the life and work of writers from Maranhão, in addition to allowing direct access to works and documents that are already in public domain, results from a project born at a href="http://nupill.ufsc.br/">NuPILL (Center for Research in Informatics, Literature and Linguistics) in collaboration with LAPESD (Research Laboratory in Distributed Systems): the Digital Library of Literature of Lusophone Countries, which is, as a rule, the primary and free source of literary documents in full version, as well as the largest database of literary history of Brazilian and Portuguese literature that we know.
The activities related to the Digital Library of Maranhense Literature began in 2015 with the approval of the Caxiense Academy of Letters Collection project: preservation, digitization and dissemination, financed by FAPEMA (Foundation for Support in Research and Scientific and Technological Development of Maranhão), in the context of the ADOC call, in which, in a systematic way, the researches developed in the collection of the Academia Caxiense de Letras (ACL) began. In 2016, two other PIBIC/UEMA/FAPEMA projects were approved, at the time, to work with the digitization, revision and treatment of works by the writer Coelho Neto present in the collection. Also in 2016, another project was approved to work in the ACL collection, this time with the PIBITI/UEMA call, the only one in the area of Letters with approval. In addition, to account for the large amount of data obtained with the aforementioned projects and to continue the actions of preservation and dissemination of the ACL collection, a project was submitted to the UNIVERSAL FAPEMA No. 40/2015 call, which was also approved in 2016, the Maranhão Portal Project: First Phase, whose objective was to create a space with historical and literary information about the production of writers from Maranhão. Since then, the project has been maintained with the help of other public calls, mostly financed by FAPEMA.
In addition, to account for the large amount of data obtained with the aforementioned projects and to continue the actions of preservation and dissemination of the ACL collection, a project was submitted to the UNIVERSAL FAPEMA Nº 40/2015 call, which was also approved in 2016, the Maranhão Portal Project: First Phase, whose objective was to create a space with historical and literary information about the production of writers from Maranhão. Since then, the project has been maintained with the help of other public calls, mostly financed by FAPEMA.
Thus, arising from the initiatives of LAMID - Research Center in Art, Literature and Media - in partnership with UEMA - State University of Maranhão - with FAPEMA, with the Caxiense Academy of Letters, NuPILL and LAPESD, the Digital Library of Literatura Maranhense aims to disseminate the literary production of Maranhão, with free access for readers and researchers from different places and institutions. The Portal Maranhão, by providing literary works in a digital environment, fills an existing gap with regard to access to works and data from writers from Maranhão who, in view of the difficulty of access and the precarious state of preservation, are not available for students and academics who are interested in Maranhão literature or who have it as an object of study and research.
Finally, we clarify that Portal Maranhão is a digital site that, like the Digital Literature Library of Lusophone Countries, is constantly updating and correcting data and has the collaboration of users, who can send questions and suggestions to nupill.ufsc@gmail.com.