Information technology and libraries: The National Library of Spain is over with the first stage of the digitization of incunabula

Converting incunabula into digital format is one of the current tasks of the National Library of Spain. The first phase of high quality digitization of early printed books (incunabula) from the library’s fund, which are now easy accessible online for any reader, was completed in May of this year.

In this process overall 350 books of the XV century were digitized. These books were printed in Latin, Spanish and Catalan languages at printing houses that were founded by German craftsmen in Barcelona, Seville and Burgos.

A work on the reconciliation of bibliographic data of incunabula was done in the process of digitization. On the next phase is planned to digitize the books of XV-XVI centuries with etching illustrations.