The Universitat will digitalize half of the collection of the Library of the Aragonese Kings of Naples to create the first virtual library to gather three Middle Age and Renaissance European royal collections. The Libraries and Documentation Service participates in the project Europeana Regia, which will allow the general public to consult 874 documents and 307,000 images coming from five European libraries. These institutions are Bibliotèque National de Paris, the coordinator’s project, the Royal Library of Belgium, and the German Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and Herzog August Bibliothek. Moreover, some collections already digitalized will be added by the British Library, the library Vittorio in Naples and several French local libraries.
Europeana Regia will intregrate, virtually, three European libraries: Library of the Aragonese Kings of Naples collected along XV century; Bibliotheca Carolina dated VIII and IX centuries; and the library of Charles V and family dated XIV century (France). In the first library, 282 originals will be digitalized; in the second, 425; and 167 in the third. The project was created two years ago and will finish by next June. It has a budget of 3,4 million Euros, 1,7 of them financed by the European Union. The Universitat de València will receive 282,000 Euros from this funding.
The Universitat de València provides the project with 92 manuscripts, from the 226 in the Library of the Aragonese Kings gathered in its Historical Library. These documents, equivalent to 40,000 images, were donated by the Duque de Calabria to the monestry of San Miguel de los Reyes. They were taken to the university library because of the Mendizábal’s seizure. The Universitat has a rich patrimony made up of 2,978 manuscripts, 334 incunabulum, more than 40,000 documents dated from XVI to XVIII, etc. Among its manuscripts collection, there are volumes from the Library of Aragonese Kings in Naples, one of the most important European humanistic libraries.
The technical manager of the Libraries and Documentation Service, Victoria García Esteve, has stated that this initiative ‘allows the spreading of great value manuscriptsa and helps us to better preserve the originals’. Moreover, ‘working with important European libraries is especially encouraging.’
The project will finish next summer, but a great number of documents and images can ba already consulted on www.europeanaregia.eu.
Last update: 16 de january de 2012 16:05.
News release
