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The Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid is the
head institution of the national librarian system in Spain. This library is
directed to the needs of a very large public, but it is more focused on those
of general researches.
The collections of the Biblioteca
Nacional include all types of publications or printed material. Apart from its
books and periodicals collections, it holds several sections that hold specific
and special collections such as the Manuscript and Rare Books Collection, Music
and Audiovisual Collection, Cartographic Collection, and the Drawings and
Prints Collection (that includes two subsections such as the Photography
Collection and the Ephemera Collection).
The amount of material held in this
library is approximately as follows: Books - 6,000,000 vols.; Newspapers and
magazines - 100,000 titles; Manuscripts - 30,000; Incunabula and Rare books -
203,000; Other printed materials such as brochures, postcards, posters, musical
scores - 2,000,000; Sound recordings - 300,000; Maps - 200,000; Audiovisual
material - 51,000; electronic supports - 53,000; Prints and Drawings - 145,000:
Photographs - 1,500,000 (both photographic prints and negatives).
After several publication-deposit laws
throughout recent history in Spain, each one with different degrees of success,
it is since 1958 that both publishers and printers operating in the country
have had a legal obligation to send at least one copy of each of their
publications to the Legal Deposit Office (Depósito Legal) of the
Biblioteca Nacional.
The Photographic Collection is held as a
subsection in the Drawings and Engravings Collection Department and it holds
around 600,000 prints from both the nineteenth and the twentieth century, and
close to 700,000 negatives mainly from the twentieth century (the shown amount
is corroborated by inventory). The collection covers a chronological period
that spans from approximately the early 1850s to the last years of twentieth
century. Most photographic and photomechanical processes developed during this
large period are well represented in this collection.
The nineteenth century photographic print
collection is made up of several thousand large portrait collections, albums of
all kinds, books illustrated with early original photographs, photographic
original collections and a large and diverse set of loose prints; as well as an
important group of early photomechanical prints and serial productions. Albumen
paper is, of course, the most abundant process represented in this group.
The negative collection is for the most
part made up of twentieth century material and comprises the negatives of
various commercial studios and press / propaganda civil war photography.
Collodion negatives are not to be found in this collection, and most of the
types of negatives to be found are gelatin emulsions on either glass plates or
any of the many types of flexible supports (nitrate, acetate, etc.) used
throughout the history of modern photography.
The Photographic Collection as a whole
(prints + negatives) has its own monitored (controlled temperature-relative
humidity) storage are in the Biblioteca Nacional building in downtown Madrid.
Nitrate based negatives and other special photographic materials are kept in a
segregated monitored areas in complete isolation (but in the same building).
The main problem related to the conservation/preservation of photographs is
derived from the specific nature of some photographic materials, as is the case
of our negatives on nitrate or acetate supports. BNE are still in need of a
cold storage area for this type of material, and even when there have been
several specific studies in the library on how to approach in practical terms
the eventual implementation of a cold storage are in our building, it is still
a pending challenge.
Around 2,000 persons a year use the
Photographic Collection. Access to the collection is done through the
Guide-inventory of the photographic collection published in 1989, as well as
with the various lists we are producing as updates to this guide. BNE has few
catalogued photographs in the computer system of the library, and even when
some studies have been done to put photograph references online, they are still
studying the possibilities of the Marc system for the description and retrieval
of photographic materials.
Most of the photographic prints
collection have been described at the level of inventory, which already
includes the main fields that are going to use for cataloguing; this allows to
build a strategy for the next description level step, and it allows to
determine the level of description necessary for each part of the collection,
and it also gives information in relation of the tools needed to achieve a
coherent catalogue (closed lists of terms, thesaurus, headings lists, etc.)
At the moment there are different levels
of description defined, and they depend on the importance of a given set of the
collection, on specific nature of the holdings, as well as on those defined by
the general requests of our users.
The negative collection is in the process
of being fully addressed. In the last years a specialist in the field of
photographic conservation and description has made a detailed inventory of the
BNE negatives, describing in each case the general structure of the different
archives, the material content and the conservation requirements and status of
each one of the parts that define this large photographic negative collection.
Last year (2000) this specialist completed the cataloguing of a specific
collection (Lagos) comprising approximately a thousand three hundred negatives
in an Access Database which includes the digitised image for each item (as well
as a full set of high/medium quality scans for each negative involved).
Biblioteca Nacional of Spain uses an ISBD
description with a Marc format (Ibermarc) for all the different materials they
hold, mainly since it is an international model for the information exchange
between libraries, but also because it is easier and cheaper to maintain one
system than several ones. Taking advantage of this system, one can achieve
access to different types materials which are under a specific heading, but at
the same time this can also be a drawback since it can introduce a high level
of noise in the retrieved information.
The main difficulty posed by the Marc
system and ISBD when describing photographic materials is that is thought,
mainly, for the description of units, and it is often hard to establish the
many relevant interrelationships amongst given sets of photographs (negatives
or prints), and the unavoidable requirement of defining these relationships
makes it is necessary to make a lot of adaptation changes to the system itself,
especially if the efforts to achieve something more or less convenient are to
be successful.
Another difficulty in this system is to
determine the correct field where some of the data must be applied - entered,
you must adapt some fields to the needs of the material because sometimes it
does not fit in as is anticipated by the system itself. A lot of information
related to the photographs in this system must be logged in the notes-areas
since photographs have very little textual information associated to them, and
in some cases (it depends on the application) that could be a problem when
retrieving since it makes it especially necessary to make lots of efforts in
the normalisation of the terms to be included in these fields.
Isabel Ortega García, Responsable
de la Sección de Fotografía, Servicio de Dibujos y Grabados
Special thanks to: Gerardo Kurtz
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