Voces del Prado

Library, Archive and Documentation Centre

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

It was decided that all the Museum's documentary services were to be set up at the Casón del Buen Retiro and it was resolved that they be grouped in the same area. That was when the Library and the Archive and Documentation Service, which until then had been under Registry, were grouped together.
The Library, Archive and Documentation Area consists of three parts, as its name suggests. The Library service is basically dedicated to acquiring, via donation or exchange, and buying reference materials, books, magazines and other materials, also electronic resources, which have become very important in recent years. It is made available to internal and external staff, to researchers, students, basically anyone interested in studying the history of art or the collections of the Museum.
On the other hand we have the Archive, which since the inauguration of the Museum in 1819 is of a historical and administrative nature; it continues to receive documentation today. It took approximately ten years to transfer the full Archive from the offices to the Casón. It is an important, medium-sized Archive, consisting of around 4,000 boxes, with documents on the history of the Museum, a very important part of the cultural life of Madrid and Spain. Throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries it has been a fundamental Archive to study the cultural history of Spain, two hundred years spanning into three centuries. The main function is bringing together all the existing information on the Museum's collections, in order to build a documentary system enabling internal work, on the one hand, and serving as a depository for the memory of everything related to the works of art in the Museum, on the other.