Presentation of DIGIBIS to this on line edition
Tachi Hernando de Larramendi
Director General
DIGIBÍS
10 years ago after the digital edition project in CD-roms of theComplete Works,Collection of LettersandMenéndez Pelayo’s Bibliographywas completed, it can be said that an era ended for DIGIBÍS, heir of DIGIMAP, and a new stage opened up. This is so because the aforementioned disc, which I coordinated from the IT point of view, as technical director of DIGIBIS at that time incorporated important novelties from the digital edition point of view.
If, until then, a set of disks had been made for the Tavera Foundation, the extensive collection ofTavera Classics, using the DIGIPRESV programme and facsimile reproductions of the vast set of books that were essential for Hispano-American culture, now it was time to advance to a full text edition, mainly due to the nature of Don Marcelino’s work.
Another important development was the use of coding in HTML, which was also meant an important boost towards editing on the Internet. In that project I worked with both my father and Xavier Agenjo, who later joined as project director of the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation, after his passage through the Menéndez Pelayo Library.
And in fact, although the Tavera Classics collection continued for several more years, incorporating into its repertory a very significant number of facsimile editions grouped into different discs, soon DIGIBIS, Digital Productions, produced the first of its virtual libraries based on a set of elements already latent in that cd-rom, but incorporating a large number of features both bibliographical as well as computing and with a special attention to the international regulations and the initiatives of the Ministry of Culture.
To that Virtual Library of Andalucia followed the Historic Press Virtual Library, the Directory and Harvester of Digital Collections and a large number of all types of libraries based on the latest advances in technology, in the most recent developments of the regulations and this all being increasingly accompanied with European Union projects (in brackets I can say that the work to edit on the Internet a good part of the digitized books in the Tavera Classics is well advanced, which are now published by the MAPFRE Foundation and included in a new project calledContemporary Latin American History and Culture)
The editing on the Internet of the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library not only involves the creation of a new site for the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation, but the application of the last of the DIGIBIB versions of the programme, which began to be developed with the projects that I have quoted and which now are made up of an extensive and rich set of features.
It also has the certainty that the project will be undertaken in the most appropriate line, as evidenced by the certification of the Europeana project or HISPANA project, thelatter also developed by DIGIBIS, and that adds the digital objects generated by DIGIBIB with no problem at all. In the latest versions special attention has been paid to the Web 2.0 tools, as well as the latest versions of the exchange standards and digital preservation of information, such as MARC XML, Dublin Core, METS and PREMIS, as well as information structures that allow the recovery to free text but maintaining the facsimile image of the page as established by the Analyzed Text Layout Object.
Given the characteristics of the proprietary collection that make up the majority of the virtual libraries developed by DIGIBIS (but not all, there is this the model project of the Centre for Documentation of the MAPFRE Foundation) special care has been given to the application of tools that allow scholars and researchers the bibliographic management of databases, using tools such as Zotero, RefWorks, CiteUlike, without neglecting the wider dissemination of information through social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.
A new stage undoubtedly starts ten years later, marked by these new tools for managing digital content in aggregates that make up the virtual libraries and at the same time disseminating and preserving through large national aggregators such as HISPANA, the great European Europeana project (and EuropeanaLocal) or through OAIster, now integrated in OCLC, included in the WorldCat, the largest of the international bibliographic tools.
DIGIBIS is already preparing, and its Innovation Department is responsible for this. A large number of new developments, applications, services and products which are really avant garde may be carried out, without a doubt, thanks to the continued support of the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation and, above all, of the substantial body, always growing, of cultural institutions, and businesses of all kinds who as clients maintain their confidence in the initiative and solvency of DIGIBIS and who which we are sure we will not let them down.
Madrid, 3 December 2009,
festivity of San Francisco Javier
