INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLECTION OF SPANISH AMERICAN POLYMATH AUTHORS

The Collection of Spanish Polymath Authors has its roots in the academic studies and works dealing with library science by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, brought up to date by Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi, and at the present time it is the main component of the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library.

Unlike the initial version of the Larramendi Virtual Library of Polymath Authors, and unlike certain studies carried out on such polymaths as Gregorio Mayans y Siscar and Juan Valera, the project has now set out down a new path whose strategic objective is to take full advantage of the electronic resources on the Web placed at our disposal by other institutions so as to avoid duplication of effort while digitizing what has not yet been digitized and in this way put together not just complete repositories of works by polymath authors but rather encyclopaedic records of authors with digital aggregations bringing together bibliographic sources, library resources, critical studies, and even iconic representations of authors and their works, thereby forming what in the Linked Open Data system are known as triplets, the Linked Open Data system being a project that has redefined the so-called ontologies and Semantic Webs.

The purpose of this Collection of Spanish Polymath Authors, then, is to contribute to the creation of an encyclopaedia of Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian, and Spanish American thinkers on the Web offering not just hyperlinks to outside information sources but digital aggregations of electronic information extant on the Web as a whole.

At the same time, the project requires a series of tools and new methods for describing electronic resources for sustainability and compliance with key trends on the Web.

Therefore, for the first time in Spain and nearly in the world, the 433 polymath authors making up the Collection of Spanish Polymath Authors have been coded by means of Resource Description and Access (RDA) coding and Dublin Core metadata loaded into an OAI repository, thereby enabling them to be entered into WorldCat (the world's largest repository of descriptions of digital resources) through OAIster; to be taken up by Europeana; and, above all, to be visible for harvesting by Google and Yahoo.

Authors have also been catalogued in MARC/RDA and generate Dublin Core, METS, and PREMIS metadata sets as well as ALTO (Analyzed Layout Text and Object) metadata sets identifying each character of each word by its individual coordinates on the source page, all of which adds greatly to record visibility.

This type of processing, along with cooperation of different sorts with other institutions and scholars, especially in the form of aggregation of metadata harvested on the Web, all combine to make up the content of the Collection of Spanish Polymath Authors (staying true to the concept created by Menéndez Pelayo as a primary feature of the digital collection), in this way affording one or more hyperlinks to information on each author or his digital works.

Furthermore, all kinds of interconnected digital resources on the Web are aggregated to each polymath. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the "Saavedra Fajardo" Virtual Library, the "Filosofía en español" project, the "Ensayo Hispánico" project, the "Patrimonio Bibliográfico" Virtual Library, and the "Prensa Histórica" Virtual Library, as well as the large projects undertaken by the world's most prestigious national libraries, such as the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and large networks like OCLC, the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue, and others contain or re-transmit digitized information, both as secondary sources of biobibliographical information and as primary sources of digitized resources as such.

To conclude, again true to one of Menéndez Pelayo central ideas, the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation remains firmly committed to ensuring that the thought of active figures in the culture of Spain who are authors of an oeuvre which because of its size or its coverage of a range of different subject areas has been important to cultural development, or which for any other reason deserves to be made known in the twenty-first century, will be available internationally.

Salamanca School

The Foundation is currently at work on a microsite comprising representatives of what has come to be called the Salamanca School, a term generally used in reference to a rebirth of thinking on a variety of subjects by a group of Spanish and Portuguese university professors starting with the intellectual efforts and teaching endeavours carried out by Francisco de Vitoria at the University of Salamanca, which undeniably had an important and influential impact on the theory of law and economics internationally.

There is no unanimous agreement among scholars as to who made up the Salamanca School, hence the selection may include a certain subjective element, even though it was made using the most eminent studies on the subject.

Accordingly, the following authors have been selected: Juan Roa Dávila, Martín de Azpilcueta, Luis de León, Francisco de Vitoria, Luis de Molina, Francisco Suárez, Bartolomé de Medina, José de Acosta, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Pedro de Fonseca, Diego Pérez de Mesa, Domingo de Soto, Bartolomé de las Casas, Tomás de Mercado, Juan de Mariana, Melchor Cano, Diego de Covarrubias, Juan de la Peña, Domingo Báñez, Gabriel Vázquez

Texto actualizado el 15 de julio de 2010