Features of this Web edition

Logo de la Fundación Ignacio Larramendi. Fragmento.

Unlike the initial version of the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library of Polymath Authors, and unlike certain studies carried out on such polymath authors as Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, Alfonso Reyes, and Andrés Bello, the approach employed for this new edition is to take full advantage of the electronic resources on the Web placed at our disposal by other institutions so as to avoid duplication while concentrating our efforts on digitizing what has not yet been converted into an electronic format.

The idea is thus to put together on this website complete repositories of the works by polymath authors who have been selected for inclusion in one of the four collections in the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library (digitized either by our Foundation or someone else). All based on scientific quality standards as announced in the General Introduction to the print edition of the FHL Virtual Libraries published by the Foundation. A fuller description of the methodology employed is available at FHL Virtual Libraries, 2008 edition, pages 41-50 and 57-60.

A true virtual encyclopaedia

One of the direct visual and functional effects of this undertaking is to create digitally structured encyclopaedia entries with high visibility accessible on the Web.

The project has been planned out from a wholly contemporary perspective to create a genuine digital 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.

New methods and tools

Making the project sustainable and compliant with the main Internet trends mean including a series of tools and new methods of description for all sorts of electronic resources. The main trends considered here are summarized below:

  • Supplying users with interrelated contextual information that will bypass the limitations imposed by description rules currently in use, adopting a new model for describing electronic resources (RDA, Resource Description and Access) specifically designed to help relate concepts and expand informational content beyond the confines of library management.
  • Including various different metadata schemes for managing digital collections to ensure collection quality and to lay the groundwork for digital conservation of the collections.
  • Including OCR (optical charactering recognition) technologies and providing both text and image versions of digital copies.
  • Employing metadata search and harvesting protocols that will afford the FHL Virtual Libraries the greatest visibility.
  • Including Web 2.0 tools that will help create a community of specialists with the FHL Virtual Libraries at its core, both to increase information availability and to take advantage of the tools being placed at their disposal.

Coding of the 777 polymaths comprising the various Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian, and Spanish American digital collections on this website thus represents a groundbreaking enterprise in Spain undertaken in association with other leading institutions worldwide. It includes Resource Description and Access (RDA) coding and uses the Dublin Core metadata element set loaded into an OAI repository and hence can, through OAIster, be included in WorldCat (the world's largest repository of descriptions of digital resources); can be taken up by Europeana and Hispana; and, above all, will be visible for harvesting by Google and Yahoo.

The Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library of Polymath Authors will have a specific OAI-PMH repository of authority records, the first in Spain following the recommendations and innovations of the Virtual International Authority File.

Authors (authority records) are also 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.

As proposed, the digital collections of polymaths in the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library are structured as collections of digital objects formed by encyclopaedia entries (authority records coded in MARC 21, update 10, October 2009) metadata, generating an OAI repository and aggregations of digital objects produced either by the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library itself or by others in keeping with the plans of international institutions and projects currently under way, chief among them WorldCat/OAIster and Europeana.

Also available are Web 2.0 tools to afford visibility to Facebook and Twitter pages, for example, social labelling tools, RSS for page syndication, along with tools for sending standardized metadata to link with such library management sites as Zotero, CiteUlike, and others.

SRU server: standardized search protocol

Additionally, the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library has an SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) server and a standardized search protocol for database queries on the Web using CQL (Common Query Language), a standardized query syntax.

Under SRU messages between client and server are sent via a URL, and it is an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) reference model for Web information search services.

This protocol is maintained by the Library of Congress, and its use is also promoted by IFLA's CADS initiative. These protocols, with OAI, are part of the basic Europeana architecture and make the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library accessible both to queries and to record retrieval.

Digital resource aggregation

Furthermore, all kinds of interconnected digital resources on the Web are aggregated to each polymath. These include the Stanford Enciclopedia of Philosophy, the "Saavedra Fajardo" Virtual Library, the "Filosofía en español" project, the "Ensayo Hispánico" project, Hispana, the "Patrimonio Bibliográfico" Virtual Library, and the "Prensa Histórica" Virtual Library.

Major projects by the world's most prestigious national libraries, such as the Library of Congress, the British Library and its British Newspapers digitization project, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Gallica, and large networks like OCLC, the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue, Europeana, and EuropeanaLocal contain or re-transmit digitized information, both as secondary sources of biobibliographical information and as primary sources of digitized resources as such.

Plan of work for the coming years

The tasks planned for what might be termed phase one (2010-2011) are to be carried out in association with a series of improvements on this website to enable the FHL Virtual Libraries to stay fully abreast of emerging trends on the World Wide Web.

Planned improvements over the next few years will make allowance for developments in such proposals as the Semantic Web.

  1. Conversion of authority files for names, titles, and subjects in line with the recommendations of the W3C Semantic Web groups, including SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System).
  2. Generation of electronic and digital resources in formats like ePub, readable by electronic book readers and other mobile devices and copyright management tools). The ePub (from electronic publication) format is a standard electronic book format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).
  3. Display of data converted to SKOS under the W3C Linked Open Data project.
  4. Generation of an ontology of polymaths including all the data created in the project (biographies, bibliographies, digital publishing projects, etc.), Bibliographic Ontology Specification.
  5. Creation of a specialized OAI-PMH harvester to harvest metadata and digital resources from personal files, academic and scientific publications, and museums, including Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE).
  6. Development and implementation of a digital preservation repository in compliance with ISO standard 14721:2003 Open Archival Information System to safeguard the intellectual heritage of Spain and Spanish America.
  7. Development of innovative R&D programmes aimed at automatic and semiautomatic text markup in line with the Text Encoding Initiative. Programmes for automatic annotation ontologies in line with the Text Encoding Initiative Ontology will also be needed.
  8. Development of innovative R&D programmes aimed at creating automatic translation systems (at least in Spanish, English, and Latin) for query interfaces, text files produced by optical character recognition, and descriptions. Translations should be produced in real time on request by users.