Voces del Prado

Reinventing Libraries

Javier Docampo Capilla, Head of the Library, Documentation and Archives Area, 2005-2016

Libraries in general over the last few years have been and continue to be in crisis. The availability of so much information on the Internet means that they have to reinvent themselves, so to say. They have become a public meeting place, substituting for many social services.
Museum libraries are basically research libraries, which must find their place and utility for researchers. We have a good offer of digital files, allowing access to important databases, some of them in exchange for a fee.
At a time when the economic crisis curtailed the budgets of university museums, the Prado was able to continue purchasing, on a comprehensive basis, everything that was published on plastic arts, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, this being its field of specialization.
Another matter we tried to arrange at the Library was the collaboration with the rest of Spanish and foreign museum libraries. We immediately joined the Museum Library Network (BIMUS). It has a collective catalogue that allows one to query at the same time all the catalogues of the state museums. Internationally, the Library is a member of IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, including both libraries and librarians. I was a member of the Executive Board in the Art Libraries section.
We thought that the essential thing when digitizing was to start with the catalogues of the Museum collections, beginning with the famous Eusebi Catalogue of 1919. Nearly all the printed catalogues of the Museum collections have been digitized and are available on the website. Then we started to work with the exhibition catalogues. That's where we left it, back in 1995 if I remember correctly. I imagine they have continued to work on this, going back to the first temporary exhibition at the Prado Museum, dedicated to El Greco in 1902.