Digital Sources for Nineteenth Century Music in Spain: The Digitization Project of the National Library in Context

Abstract

The National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España, BNE) is the head of the Spanish library system. It holds all books published in Spain, and also several collections of different types, including the Music and Audiovisuals Department's sound recordings and sheet music. Its Department of Bibliographic Control of Periodicals catalogues both newspapers and magazines. In addition, the BNE offers a number of online services including the Hispanic Digital Library (Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, BDH) and the Digital Newspaper Library (Hemeroteca Digital, HemD). The BDH, was created in 2008 and currently provides free and open access to more than 220,000 digitized documents, including recordings and scores.1 In contrast, HemD, which is part of the BDH, focuses on the public dissemination of the digital collection of Spanish historical presses.2 It currently offers around 2,500 titles and more than 70,000,000 pages.3 Newspapers and magazines are available in PDF format and searches are facilitated by OCR (Optical Character Recognition).