Menéndez Pelayo Virtual: Introduction

Xavier Agenjo Bullón
Facultative Body of Archivists, Librarians and Archaeologists
Director (on leave) of the Menéndez Pelayo Library
Project Director of the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8338-8087

 

De arriba abajo: Menéndez Pelayo, Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi y Nicolás AntonioThe digitized works of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo are edited on website, after the lapse of ten years from the presentation in the Menéndez Pelayo Library of Santander, in the Hispanic Society of America in New York and in the National Library of Anthropology and History of Mexico, the latter in the company of José Luis Martínez (1918-2007), who died recently and whom I wish to pay tribute in this introduction to the Menéndez Pelayo Virtual Library that is integrated into the FHL Virtual Libraries and that justly makes up one of its foundations.

The formation of the project and the Menéndez Pelayo ‘method’

I have had the opportunity to explain in the magnificent book Mecenazgo cultural de Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi y Montiano: crónica y testimonios that in 2002 the MAPFRE Tavera Foundation dedicated in memory of the extraordinary man that Don Ignacio was for the genesis of that project. In those pages I published, in a more or less literary manner, a conversation that came to summarize a decade of common tasks that Ignacio had the kindness of assiduously convene me to.

I then, more or less, said that don Marcelino, convinced that it was necessary to defend the thesis that Spanish history and science had existed, even though it was denied at the time by the Krausists, applied to himself the sentence that said views are discussed, but facts are checked. And in this way Don Marcelino launched into checking that Spanish thought, science, had existed. Among the items to be systematically used, although this fact is not as well-known as it should be, are the indices of the Hispana Vetus Library (1672) and the Hispana Nova Library (posthumously, printed in 1696) by Nicolas Antonio, which enabled the young Marcellin, of twenty-one years of age, to provide a gigantic bibliography on which to base his thesis, apart, of course, for his constant and important readings.

I think I have shown at some other time, when I edited De re bibliographica, a title which immediately reminds us of the never translated into Spanish De re diplomatica by Abate Mabillon, from whose work comes the expression "Benedictine patience" (by the way, in 2006 without ISBN and with a DL number, an edition of De re bibliographica was published without the reduced introduction of a sheet deemed appropriate to make any reference to the edition which I have just quoted and which, at the end of the day, had been edited and coordinated by the director of the Menéndez Pelayo Library in a collection that is called Cantabrian Library and by a bookshop and publisher located 500 metres from the Menendez Pelayo Library), I think I have shown, this said, that the work of Don Marcelino was based on a bibliographic methodology used very few times in Spain until then; Simon Diaz had already reported in La bibliografía: conceptos y aplicaciones how, although Spanish Bibliographic achievements are important, on the contrary there are very few reflections of a theoretical nature. I think I have proved in my edition of DE re bibliographica how Don Marcelino benefited from having had the illustrious Asturian bibliographer Maximum Fuertes Acevedo (1832- Madrid 1890), as his professor, although in Physics and Chemistry at the Institute of Santander and that many years later, as can be seen in his Collection of Letter he still called on 23 May 1889 Marcelino "my dear friend and disciple." Among the other bibliographic works Furtes Acevedo published in 1885 the Bosquejo acerca del estado que alcanzó en todas épocas la literatura en Asturias, seguido de una extensa bibliografía de los escritores asturianos. He also left two handwritten works of a bibliographic nature, which almost certainly, Don Marcelino cites in his De re bibliographica, where he states "Las Asturias. Asturias de Santillana o Montaña de Santander", differentiating it from "Las Asturias de Oviedo" and where he also refers to "Don Fuertes, professor of this Institute and the manuscript is kept in the National Library". A more detailed analysis on the subject in the book of Juan Delgado Casado can be seen in the bibliographical awards of the National Library

Menéndez Pelayo therefore created, La ciencia española and a good part of Historia de los heterodoxos españoles and of his Horacio en España and even the leaflets of Classic Hispano-latina Bibliography, with a strong theoretical support, both implicit and explicit. If I say this it is because this fact is forgotten so many times, that it is not known as it should be and, above all, coherently explains Don Marcelino’s vast knowledge much better than on the basis of the Lopez qualification of "freak of nature" or "amazing polygraph". The work of Cesare Cantu, Gli Eretici d'Italia (1865) is not valued as it should be and it is even unknown by the Hispanists, even Italians,, despite the obvious similarity of the titles and content, although the book of Don Marcelino is much more erudite and deep. Cesare Cantù and his Universal History, published between 1838 and 1846, was an author whose work was greatly disseminated in Spain and as Julio Camba commented it was part of the furniture of all bourgeois houses, together with El Diccionario Enciclopédico Hispano-Americano de Literatura, Ciencias y Artes published between 1887 and 1889 by Montaner and Simon de Barcelona publishing house, a major Spanish reference work in the 19th century, so used by Don Marcelino, and the Historia del telescopio. A very much used copy of El Diccionario Enciclopédico is still kept in the Menéndez Pelayo Library.

However, Don Marcelino realized that although he had proved through the development of the cited works and the list of authors and titles the existence of that Spanish science and thought, it was necessary to go a step further. It also should be noted here that his friend and mentor Gumersindo Laverde Ruiz (Estrada, Cantabria, 5 April 1835 - Santiago de Compostela, 12 October 1890),who wrote little, but very selectively, “says Don Marcelino in a fundamental text for the purpose of this Introduction, the author of the book Ensayos críticos sobre Filosofía, Literatura e Instrucción Pública (1868), partially purged the bibliographic transport of La ciencia española, but who undoubtedly introduced some acrimony that Don Marcelino already in his maturity, that is to say, in his early twenties, began to eliminate from his works and which he totally finished off in Advertencias preliminares in the second edition of the Heterodoxos, in July 1910.

The second step: the project becomes a reality, and is enlarged

The next step was of a librarianship nature (Ignacio and I continued to discuss), not only was it sufficient to cite those titles, but we had to move from the secondary document, the bibliographic reference, to the book itself, for which he began to assemble a fabulous library where a large part of those works cited went from being on strange shelves to his library in Santander. This library, the work of my patient effort, the only work of mine of which I am somewhat satisfied, he donated to the town and city of Santander almost unconditionally in a memorable Testament that Pablo Beltran de Heredia and I published in 2000. A constitutive element of that testament was the figure of librarian, the only requirement that the city of Santander was asked for and that, on writing this, has not been fulfilled.

De arriba abajo: Menéndez Pelayo, Bonilla, Asín Palacios, Sainz Rodríguez, Menéndez Pidal y Abellán.

Therefore, as I said, it was necessary to take a new step and make all those books collected in Santander available on the Internet... and there was no need to say more. Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi who knew and admired Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s work, immediately drew up a project to raise awareness of this immense bibliographic legacy, not only to endorse the thesis of the existence of the Spanish culture, but so that this would serve as a support and theoretical assistance to the growing presence of the Hispanic and Iberian in the world of the 21st century, that he, as chief executive of MAPFRE knew perfectly.

In fact, they are two sides of the same coin the expansion of MAPFRE throughout Latin America and the fabulous MAPFRE 1492 Collection published by the MAPFRE America Foundation under the pretext of the Fifth Centenary of the Discovery of America. That is to say, it was necessary to establish the intellectual principles of that extraordinary action of Spain in America and in the world based on solid reasons. And there can be no more solid reasons that more than 250 books, in which 330 historians from 40 countries collaborated, grouped in a plurality of collections, they analysed the historical moment from all points in which, as stated by Jaume Vicens Vives (or he says something very similar), Spain introduced its cradle into History. There were still 53 unpublished books that appeared later in digital format in the collective work of Tres grandes cuestiones de la Historia de Iberoamérica, in 2005.

The truth is that nothing seems more logical that the fact that Don Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi coincided in many theoretical and intellectual postulates with Don Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, and that he would turn to the librarian of the Menéndez Pelayo Library, who Don Marcelino entrusted in his testament specific tasks such as creating at beginning of the 20th century, the Menéndez Pelayo Virtual Library, so as to build on that the FHL Virtual Libraries, whose first listings we began to count by then.

For even greater consistency, we were able to rely on the work of Don Adolfo Bonilla and San Martín (Madrid, 1875 - Madrid, 17 January 1926).

It is significant to have been able to take the references and the three images of Don Marcelino, Don Adolfo and Don Ignacio of the Philosophy in Spanish project that the Gustavo Bueno Foundation promotes and that is carried out by the professor Gustavo Bueno Sánchez, a good specialist both in the history of the Spanish philosophy as in the automation of the bibliographic information where he has played a crucial and very little known role.

Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and Ramón Menéndez Pidal

How many times is the relationship between Don Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Don Marcelino and the teacher-student relationship that existed between them remembered how Don Ramon came to Santander every summer to study in Don Marcelino’s library and he succeeded him in his chair when Don Marcelino left it to take up the position of the National Library’s director. However, the work of another direct disciple of Menéndez Pelayo, Don Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin is less remembered (in brackets, one just cannot imagine what Don Marcelino’s library could have been like working almost like in a public library in which, Don Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968), Don Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin (1875-1926) and Miguel Asín Palacios (1871-1944) worked side by side, to cite only three names. I would like to point out the proximity of the date of birth of the three polygraphs and the enormous disparity in the dates of their death.

Bonilla and the 'corpus of Spanish philosophy history'

Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, of whom Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez has left a vivid testimony (Madrid, 1897 - 1986), to whom we will have to return later, not enjoyed the long life of the author of the Orígenes del español. On the contrary, Bonilla did not even reach the age of his master, Don Marcelino, and did not reach the age of 51. He left an amazing work which, precisely, and with me acting in this case as a polygraph - I will explain later what I refer to, I am bringing together thoroughly. Bonilla y San Martin, along with important legal and literary works, truly undertook the systematic study of Spanish philosophy. The knowledge of Menéndez Pelayo and Bonilla y San Martin astonished the young Mircea Eliade in his training period in Italy.

It is clear that when Don Marcelino respectively answered the two maiden speeches of Menéndez Pidal and Bonilla y San Martin in the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language and History, respectively, I could exclaim that if I did not conquer Moorish Kings, I fathered those who defeated then, that in these times dominated by political correctness they are explained by the context in which they were delivered, that is to say in praise of the best expert of old romances, from where those two verses are taken. In fact, Bonilla y San Martin published during Don Marcelino’s life, and when no one could think that both were going to die, not only the first two volumes of La historia de la filosofía española (desde los primeros tiempos al siglo XII) in 1908, and Historia de la filosofía española: (Siglos VIII-XII: judíos) in 1911, but the full programme of what we might call the discipline that appeared in the first of the volumes listed on pages 44 to 54 and justified collection, by José Luis Abellán in 1979 as an appendix on pages 359 to 370 of the first volume of his Historia crítica del pensamiento español. Metodología e introducción histórica; in honour of Professor Abellán must recognise and admire that for the first and only time a full history of the Spanish thought has been concluded. In any case, Professor Gustavo Bueno Sánchez, without doubt one of the best connoisseurs of the history of philosophy does not agree with this approach and it is important to leave a sample of it here.

Abellán mentioned between the precedents of what has been called the 'corpus of philosophy history' and that completed the first two volumes of Bonilla, i.e.:

De arriba abajo: Cruz Hernández, Bello, Reyes, Oliveira, Maravall, León-Portela, dos de los libros con las Actas de las Jornadas de Hispanismo Filosófico y Jiménez García

On page 63 of his cited Historía crítica José Luis Abellán expressed his hope of a possible publication of the "corpus". After 30 years the idea should perhaps be discarded and I cannot hide the fact that, in a sense, I aspire that these FHL Virtual Libraries take their place, including, as is logical, and within which copyrights allow, the works of Bonilla, the Carreras brothers, Cruz Hernández and Solana. In fact, Bonilla’s works are already digitized in their great majority and close to becoming an author’s library for which I will be the academic.

As has been said, Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi not only saw with clarity the project of putting the bibliographic collection assembled by Don Marcelino and deposited in his Santander library on the Internet, but it was clear that there was a need for a second Portuguese Polymath Virtual Library, a third for Brazilian Polymaths and a fourth one for Hispanic American Polymaths. The latter was able to personally promote it and therefore, and after costly negotiations, both the Andrés Bello digital, as well as Alfonso Reyes digital could be published. And it was in Mexico, D.F., where those agreements due to the presentation that I have already quoted of the Menéndez Pelayo Digital in the National Library of Anthropology and History of Mexico, presented, as I said, by Jose Luis Martinez (director of the Mexican Academy of Language between 1980 and 2002, and since 2003 its perpetual honorary director, and Medal of Honour of the Menéndez Pelayo International University in 1993), and attended by Jesus Manuel Zaballa, then chairman of the Obra Social Caja Cantabria that so promoted (at that time) the realization of the project which, by the way, we also presented to the Marcelino Botín Foundation, as Don Marcelino was callealtero, months before this was launched on the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library.

Polymath Virtual Library

In fact, it was decided to adopt the name of Andrés Bello to headline the Hispanic American Polymath Virtual Library, as well as that of José de Anchieta (San Cristobal de la Laguna, Tenerife, 1534 - 1597) for the Brazilian writers and Francisco Manuel de Melo (Lisbon, 1608 - Alcantara, Portugal, 1666) for the Portuguese polygraphs, although in the latter case it might have been wiser to use the name of Joaquim Pedro Oliveira Martins (Lisbon, 1845 - Lisbon, 1894), a rigorous contemporary and good friend of Don Marcelino, which as can be seen in the letters crossed between both and contained in Menéndez Pelayo’s Collection of Letters and, what is more important, the references to the Portuguese person’s work make reporters and correspondents. By the way, that when Historia de la civilización ibérica  was re-edited, so that perhaps it could be currently improved, in 1974, Jose Antonio Maravall (Davison, 1911 - Madrid, 1986) gave it a magnificent prologue, very much in line with what has been said in this introduction, and in general with the purposes of the FHL Virtual Libraries, since professor Maravall has been one of the greatest scholars of Hispanic historical thought.

Among the many aids that we have to develop those lists have been so interesting, I would like to especially quote Miguel León-Portilla (Mexico City; 22 February 1926-), director of the Mexican Academy of History that, twinned with the director of the Mexican Academy of the Spanish Language, which has already been mentioned, endorsed it without any formal commitment, as some years later Pedro Luis Barcia (28 June 1939, Gualeguaychú, province of Entre Ríos), director of the Argentine Academy of Letters also did.

 Philosophical Hispanism Association

We are also looking for the collaboration with the Philosophical Hispanism Association from the start. In the first place, the Tavera Foundation financed the publication of the 3rd Conference of the Association, Studies on the history of Spanish thought.

Subsequently, the Ignacio Larramendi took on this work with no protagonism with the editing and publication of the 4th conference, Towards a new inventory of science in Spain(1999), the 5th, New studies on the history of Spanish thought(2001) and the 6th and 7th Conferences, Spanish and Latin American Thought : an approach from the 21st century(2003 and 2005 respectively).

The Foundation also collaborated as in the financing of the organisation for the 4th Conference, which took place with the unexplained protests of the traditional hurdles in the, no doubt, sanctuary of Philosophical Hispanism, the Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo Library. All this is described in the Chronicle that was signed by the director of the Menéndez Pelayo Library Bulletin, year LXXVI, January-December 2000, pages 707 to 726. To this should be added the regrettable early death of Antonio Jiménez Garcia (1950-2008), professor of the History of the Spanish philosophy as the successor of José Luis Abellán, chairman of the Philosophical Hispanism Association and editor of several of the acts mentioned above.

Menéndez Pelayo Virtual Library

At this point we should go back and limit ourselves to the Menéndez Pelayo Digital project which, transformed today in Menéndez Pelayo Virtual Library, is published on the Internet.

It is now appropriate to talk about the different previous editions and it is not possible to resist the temptation to give the role to Gustavo Bueno Sanchez, who in the pages dedicated to both Menéndez Pelayo as well as Ignacio de Larramendi (and to Eloy Bullón Fernández (1879-1957), a direct disciple of Don Marcelino, first as director of the Royal Academy of History Library when Don Marcelino was not only the director of the Royal Academy but who lived there, and whose testimony is collected by Damaso Alonso in Menéndez Pelayo, literary critic: (Las palinodias de Don Marcelino) about the method that Menéndez Pelayo followed to compose his work). Thus, Gustavo Bueno dedicates a brief entry, but enough and highly informative to each one of the different editions of Menéndez Pelayo: Colección de escritores castellanos, Obras completas, «final edition reviewed by the author», National Edition, Collection of Letters, Menéndez Pelayo digital.

It is also interesting to see the review that he dedicated in the digital magazine El Catoblepas to Mayans y Siscar, where there are very interesting news about the continuity of Don Ignacio’s project, perceived from an institution such as the Gustavo Bueno Foundation, in spite of the ideological remoteness of Ignacio Larramendi’s principles, as can be seen in the Traditionalist Thinkers Virtual Library, an exact correspondence in the study, promotion and dissemination of Spanish thought on the Internet.

In Gustavo Bueno’s review the National Edition is mentioned under the charge of the laborious and continued effort of Don Enrique Sanchez Reyes, director of the Menéndez Pelayo Library, and published by the Superior Council of Scientific Research. What Gustavo Bueno does not mention, although it was published in the cd rom in a somewhat hidden manner, which has been corrected in this edition on the Internet, is how the Superior Council of Scientific Research through its publications, then led by Miguel Angel Garrido, assigned the rights of the national edition to the Foundation for the Digital Edition of Menéndez Pelayo, very much in line with what had happened until then. In effect, as can be read in Don Marcelino’s aforementioned testament, he bestowed his copyrights to his brother Enrique and these subsequently passed to his widow, Doña Maria, with the aim of spreading in the best way possible Menéndez Pelayo’s work, assigned them to the Menéndez Pelayo Society. When in 1939 and with José Ibáñez Martin being the Minster for Education, as the latter indicates in his Foreword to this edition, Miguel Artigas, director of the National Library and the holder of the General Directorate for Archives and Libraries, and Enrique Sanchez Reyes, Director of the Menéndez Pelayo Library, in its Preliminary warning, the Menéndez Pelayo society assigned the rights to the CSIC for the National Edition and we have already seen how the rights of that edition on 23 August 1998 passed to the Foundation Tavera, as documented in the Chronicle of the Bulletin of the Menéndez Pelayo Library, year LXXV, January-December 1999, pages 677-678.

The press of the time picked up on the moment of the signing of the agreement between Manuel Garrido of the CSIC and Ignacio Larramendi. The signing took place in the office and bureau of Don Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, under the attentive and smiling gaze of the Councillor of Culture Rafael de la Sierra. In fact, Menéndez Pelayo’s rights as the author had already prescribed in 1992, although well advanced into the 1990s they still continued being charged to the Library of Catholic Authors, which had astonished Don Marcelino, until this was cut off by the centre's management. In any case, some of these incidents can be followed, both in the proceedings of the Menéndez Pelayo Society, still unpublished but that were laid out in computer format in preparation for the 75th anniversary of the Menéndez Pelayo Society, as well as in the magnificent study of Julio Neira "Menendezpelayismo and ortegafobia", published in 2000

What draws so much attention is the fact that the Menéndez Pelayo Society has partially published the contents of the Menéndez Pelayo Digital in the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library. The recent development of an agreement to edit together the work of Rafael Altamira has informed me that the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library ensures that the counterparty has the rights to the digital edition of the texts, which is not the case. Anyway, the greater the presence of Menéndez Pelayo on the Internet, the better and, of course, don Marcelino could not be missing in the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library where, in fact, a good part, if not all of it was already there, the introductions of Don Marcelino to the Lope de Vega Theatre, editions that the Spanish Royal Academy considered appropriate to instruct them to Don Marcelino at the end of the 19th century.

Within the logic of these events it was completely normal that Don Enrique Sanchez Reyes, successor of Miguel Artigas heading up the Menéndez Pelayo Library, was the one who, as is logical had all of the materials, should be responsible for the National Edition published by the Board. Here it would be useful to have a small paragraph and cite that the work of Don Enrique was truly comprehensive, publishing even unpublished material which made up the10 volumes of Classic Hispanic America Bibliography and the 4 volumes of the unfinished Spanish translators Library, as Don Enrique warns in his "Collector's Warning" to the former and in the "Warning" to the latter.

Little would be left out of the reach of Don Enrique, with one small exception. In fact, Don Marcelino had left the unpublished papers for a typography mountain that he thought of publishing and to which he referred to on several occasions and I had the opportunity to publish in the Bulletin of the Menéndez Pelayo Library, dedicated specifically to honour in his retirement the late Manuel Revuelta. Like I said before about the editing in the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library of the Menéndez Pelayo Digital, the same can be said of the Bulletin, which has included the same technical characteristics that the disks have, i.e. in a facsimile mode without recognition of text in which the Town Council of Santander and the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation are not recorded in any of them, who were the ones that covered the aforementioned digital edition. Let us hope that it is possible that all numbers from 1997 can be incorporated, this time in full text, in some digital edition until the current date with their corresponding year of embargo, as is the usual practice.

The same can be said of the edition of the Collection of Letters that the Spanish University Foundation (FUE) commissioned from Manuel Revuelta, as well as director of the Menéndez Pelayo Library, and that this diligently published between 1982 and 1991. The FUE, always under the inspiration of the great menendezpelayista Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez, who has already been mentioned; he concluded, for the time being, his generous policy by assigning to the digital edition its magnificent bibliography, prepared by Amancio Labandeira Fernández, Jerome Herrera Navarro and Julio Escribano Hernández for incorporation into the Menendez Pelayo Digital.

Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez PelayoSome of Menéndez Pelayo’s works are currently being re-published, as is the case of the Orígenes de la novela published in 2008 and other texts published by the University of Cantabria in 2007 that bring together the papers presented at the 1st National Centenary Meeting of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo in Santander on 11 and 12 December 2006, and also by a curious coincidence the Orígenes de la novela in the scholarship and critical New Hispanic Romanesque Library collection, founded by Dámaso Alonso and managed in this new stage by Francisco Rico in the Editorial Gredos, which now RBA continues. It is a pity that the already known editions have been limited to be reproduced line for line, since having the digital edition available it was perfectly possible (even with the methodology with which the Ortega y Gasset ones have been prepared by the Foundation of the same name) to have a critical edition of Menéndez Pelayo’s works.

All this is possible because in the Menéndez Pelayo Library and in Don Marcelino’s former office a vast amount of the original works that would, without a doubt, modify the current status of those editions are kept in appalling conditions that traditional obstacles have prevented from improving, and maybe unpublished material might be found, such as those already mentioned in the notes for the typography mountain. Don Marcelino’s handwritten notes could also be used to -for example- copy them in the Spanish Authors Library. It is well-known (as recounted by Pablo Beltran de Heredia, nephew as is known of Enrique Sanchez Reyes) that Juan Hurtado vastly used these annotations to disseminate over decades in the Historian de la literatura española, written with Angel Gonzalez Palencia.

The DIGIBIB programme, developed by DIGIBIS

Logo de DIGIBÍSDIGIBIS has just published the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation's website on the Internet. In addition to a broad set of pages related to the purposes of the institution, the new digital edition of this Foundation is characterised by presenting new FHL Virtual Libraries, among which we find the Ignacio Larramendi Polymath Virtual Library, prepared with the latest version of the DIGIBIB programme.

Some of the many new features of DIGIBIB 6.0 have been incorporated as a result of the thorough revision of the Foundation’s website's information structure. Amongst these should be especially mentioned those devoted to the authority records. On the one hand the information is presented in the form of an encyclopaedic record and, on the other hand, used in a pioneering way in Spain, the encoding Resource Description and Access (RDA) approved for the MARC 21 Format in the tenth update of October 2009. In it there is a radically new field that raise the level of the information collected in the fields 1XX that at first, both from the cataloguing as well as encoding point of view were used to break homonyms. New fields for referencing an author in its geographic context are therefore added (places of birth, death, and activity); their chronological context (dates of birth, death, and activity) or their linguistic context (languages used in their works). This allows a later treatment of the extremely rich information.

The links to published works by the authors are also systematically used via hyperlinks, as well as to the sources of information from which we started. In both cases these sources of information are categorized as bibliographic records and electronic resources. A special case is the collections of letters on which we are currently working to submit their content document by document. This is the situation of the Collection of Letters of Menéndez Pelayo that is being structured so that it is possible to locate them letter to letter (more than 12,000), individually, and the Bibliography will be added to the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library as bibliographic records re-catalogued according to MARC/RDA, which will improve the search and retrieval of information.

The Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library presents an important novelty. Following the model of the Virtual International Authority File, but with greater wealth of data, there is an OAI-PMH repository that feeds dynamically from the MARC repository and for which the corresponding mapping has been set. The number of web 2.0 tools are also been notable increased, with special attention paid to social networks and reference management systems, having incorporated the COinS information structure to facilitate the import to applications such as Zotero, CiteUlike, RefWorks or Mendeley.

The new page re-catalogues old publications in hard disk of the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation or linked to it as electronic resources, such as the Three major issues in the history of Latin America, the Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle, or the Luis Hernando de Larramendi collection. These publications, which are treated as electronic resources in MARC /RDA format, at the same time supply a second OAI-PMH repository to increase its visibility and accessibility on the Internet.

DIGIBIB 6.0 offers tools, modules and applications for the extremely detailed processing of newspaper publication and for the management of full text searches that may be performed, where appropriate, with ALTO (Analysed Layout Text Object) files to maintain the facsimile presentation and allow the search for texts resulting from OCR on their precise coordinates in an XML structure.