Nearly 200 Spanish libraries adopt Europeana search widget

By María Luisa Martinez-Conde, Unit for Library Coordination at the Spanish Ministry

With the objective of providing easy access to the over 31 million digital objects Europeana provides access to, about 190 public libraries in Spain have implemented the Europeana search widget and there are a growing number of libraries interested in doing the same.

The Spanish libraries actively contribute to Europeana as evidenced by the large number of content providers aggregated by Hispana, the Spanish national aggregator. It is maintained by Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (MECD), which channels to Europeana more than 2,1 million records. Among the Spanish libraries contributing to Europeana, public libraries make a significant contribution.

This is because many Spanish public libraries, especially provincial public libraries, hold an important part of the Spanish bibliographic heritage. They have been participating for more than 10 years in different cooperative ongoing digitisation projects carried out by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. This includes the Digital Library of Historical Newspapers that gathers more than 6,5 million pages of local newspapers, and/or regional ones as well.

For these reasons, the Spanish public libraries made a major contribution through EuropeanaLocal. This contribution has not stopped growing since then, so that more than 70% of the content channelled by Hispana, i.e. more tha 1,5 million records, come from public libraries.

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For implementation of the Europeana search widget, crucial support was given to the Ministry by regional library services. For instance, in the case of Asturias, a regional library, whose digital library has been part of Europeana from the beginning of the EuropeanaLocal project, it made the first implementation of the Europeana search widget. It then helped the Ministry to implement the same in 31 public libraries belonging to the network of public libraries of Asturias.

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One of the more recent implementations was made by the Public Library of Palma de Mallorca that holds an important collection of manuscripts and rare books. It has also been a contributor to Europeana for many years by digitising and granting access to projects of the Ministry. As users find the Europeana widget very helpful, the MECD, counting on the support of regions, expects to achieve 200 implementations in the next few weeks.