Over the past two years, thanks to private and public initiatives, the presence of Spanish culture on the Internet has grown enormously. It is now relatively easy to find online texts and documents of great value both to scholars and to general readers. Without going any further in this blog are collecting links to some great Internet repositories of classic books in Spanish.
Among the many initiatives undertaken recently, the project Hispana is outstanding. Hispana, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture of Spain, aggregates content from Spanish libraries, archives and museums, and is one of the largest data contributors to Europeana.
Hispana brings together the digital collections of archives, libraries and museums according to the Open Archives Initiative being promoted by the European Union, and with respect to Spain digital repositories, it performs functions that are analogous to those of Europeana regarding European repositories, in other words it acts as a content aggregator of digital collection databases.
Highlights of these collections include the institutional repositories of Spanish universities and the digital libraries of regional governments, which offer access to growing sets of all types of materials (manuscripts, printed books, photographs, maps, etc.) of the Spanish bibliographic heritage.
Through Hispana, the digital libraries of the regional governments and other, local digital libraries contribute their content to the EuropeanaLocal project, in which the Ministry of Culture of Spain participates as a national coordinator, together with 32 other institutions from 26 countries.
Through Hispana, users get online access to more than 4.300.000 digital objects from 184 repositories. See video below: