Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Spain

Manuscript Collection of The National Library of Spain

What is the National  Manuscript Collection of Spain? History and background

The collection of manuscripts in the National Library of Spain is the most important in the Hispanic area for its size (83.000 items) and importance. The initial fund was formed with the royal collections of the 18th century (Philip V from France and noble libraries in the Succession War). In the same century, the king started to create the project for a national library that could organize all the Spanish culture, adding a lot of important collections through the purchase of different private libraries.

In the 19^th century, different manuscripts from royal families, nobility,  the Church, and prestigious people in the history of Spain and the World were added to the collection by donations, purchasing, confiscation, or legal tenders.

The key to the yearly increment of the manuscript collection it’s because of the acquiring of forms of manuscripts of all kinds of thematic and prestigious people of all kind of areas that differs between nobility (Marquis of Santillana or the Counts of Benavente), poets (Rafael Morales), philosophers (Roberto Bola) or philologists (Mathilde Pomés) of the Hispanic culture.

Collection Home page and search filters. What can we find here?

The ddigital Collection was created on 9 of June of 2011. When we enter the website we can search by works (first image) or subcollections (second image). As we can see, the works ("obras") show us the most important manuscripts that the collection has to offer  (like the "History of the Indias" or "El Cid works"). On the other hand, the subcollections are filtered by genres: we have codexes, genealogy, religion, history, etc.

We can also search in the main Manuscript Collection subsection of the main National Library OPAC. We can filter by many different topics (subject, material, author, type of manuscript, years, etc) and by advanced search (filters with different types of fields, dates, and document types).

This is an example of a search made by the Advance Search. We can put the elements in different displays and we have different data of the information objects. We have displayed the author, the name of the book, the year, a presentation, and different options to export the text.

When we enter one book we have all the metadata available: Title, Date, Type, Subject, Physical description, Call number, Summary, Content, and Description. We can also go to the digitalized image to enter the full digital book.

Digitalisation process and elements available 

To understand the process background of the digitalization process we have to go back tothe end of the 90s, a time when digitalization was gradually replacing microfilming processes. First impulses began impulses begin with the digitalization of the press to facilitate consultation and prevent the deterioration that continuous use caused in the originals. The historical press joined in later, giving the origin of the Library's first digital portal: Digital Newspaper Library.

It was in 2008 that the Library developed a systematic digitization policy for its collections, giving rise to the Hispanic Digital Library (BDH). Nowadays, most of the items in the national Library have been digitalized by the latest methods, giving the most advanced and complete digital collection in Spain.

The creation of digital collections is part of a transversal process that, Broadly speaking, it can be summarized in the following stages:

· Collection Selection

· Extracting records from the catalog

· Review and selection of copies

· Planning of work lots

· Digitization

· Quality control

· Upload to the access portal and link from the catalog

 After the digitalization process of physical and digital items, images are formed with these characteristics: TIFF format, No compression, 24-bit color depth, optical resolution of 400 pixels per inch, RGB mode, and no watermarks. After this processing, are two items created: The master object and the digitalized and open to the public one. The master preservation has these formats: (.tif, wav,.mid, .mov). A master preservation file is considered to have been made with the maximum possible quality for the purposes established in each case. These master archives will not be open to the public, but they will be the archive used for the final preservation.

The digitalized one can be, depending of the object:

· PDF with these characteristics: Color, without passwords or other security options, 150pp resolution, and optimized and compressed for web reading. About the digital items, the posterior formats are usually MP4 in audio.

Web 2.0 Interactions

The National Library of Spain (BNE) has adopted several tools and platforms associated with Web 2.0 to improve accessibility, interaction and user participation. There are some examples:

· Social Networks: The BNE is present on various social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Through these social networks, the BNE interacts with its audience, answers questions, promotes resources, and encourages participation in events and activities.

· Blogs: The BNE maintains an official blog where it publishes articles, reviews, interviews and other content related to its collections, services and projects. Blogs allow the library to delve deeper into specific topics, share detailed information on new acquisitions or initiatives, and provide specialized analysis on aspects of interest to the user community.

· Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons: The BNE actively contributes to collaborative projects such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, where it shares bibliographic metadata, digitized images and other information related to its collections. These platforms make the BNE's information accessible and reusable in a wide range of contexts, facilitating research and the dissemination of knowledge.

· RSS and Newsletters: The BNE offers RSS subscription feeds and email newsletters to keep users informed about new acquisitions, events, exhibitions, and other library activities. These services allow users to stay up to date on the latest news and resources available at the BNE without having to visit the website on a regular basis.

· Crowdsourcing and Citizen Participation: The BNE has launched crowdsourcing and citizen participation projects that allow users to contribute to the enrichment of its collections. For example, the library has invited the public to transcribe digitized manuscripts or identify information in historical photographs, which helps improve the accessibility and usefulness of these materials.