The BNE presents its new platform for collaborative work

The National Library of Spain launches on 6 February a collaborative digital project to enrich its collections and catalogues, developed in collaboration with Red.es. The aim is to favour access to and the reuse of public data in an area of great interest to society such as culture.

The project seeks to put the BNE in contact with collaborators to create an interdisciplinary community and help to enrich its historical collections. The platform will allow them to transcribe, geolocate, identify or label people in digital images, as well as add information to their bibliographic and authorities catalogues. In this way, the Library's data will be even more accessible, visible and recoverable. 

For its launch and presentation, the BNE invites collaborators to join a working session in the Board Room of the National Library of Spain. The event will feature an institutional presentation of the project by the director of the National Library of Spain, Ana Santos Aramburo, and the general director of Red.es, David Cierco Jiménez de Parga.

The session will begin at 10 a.m., with the reception of the collaborators and the beginning of the collective work in the platform, and will be extended until 2 p.m. In order to attend the event, registration is necessary, as the available capacity is limited. It is also necessary to bring your own laptop.

Those who cannot attend the event will be able to participate virtually through the platform, which will be made public that day. Any citizen, anonymously or through free registration, can contribute with their knowledge and effort to enrich BNE data. Some examples of projects in which they can participate are:

• A project to transcribe and identify theatre companies and plays on 19th century theatre posters.
• A project to locate and georeference photographs taken by Jean Laurent, an essential figure in the history of 19th century photography in Spain.
• A project to identify people and discover the stories that are among the albums of the Civil War photographs.
• A project to transcribe dedications on postcards and photographs.
• A project to identify the portraits contained in a work related to the Constituent Assembly of 1869.
• A project to enrich the catalogue records related to musical groups: assignment of the musical genre and other data of interest.

With this project, the BNE takes a step forward public information opening and becomes a model to favour the reuse of cultural data, putting them at the service of research, learning and technological development.