READ CATALAN VERSION
Do you know what Catalònica is? It is a web portal promoted by the Library of Catalonia that indexes digital and digitized collections found in libraries, archives, museums and all types of institutions in Catalonia. That is, an aggregator of books, magazines and newspapers, manuscripts, incunabula, scores, sound and audiovisual materials, objects, paintings, photographs and much more.
In other words, Catalònica is the cultural memory and knowledge generated in our country, united in a single searchable space. A window to the digital collections of Catalonia that also functions as a directory of these collections, facilitating participation in international libraries and digital services. Currently, it gives access to more than 1.5 million digital objects from 32 repositories in Catalonia. Catalònica is the result of cooperation and the will to participate for a common objective: access to open information available to everyone.
Catalònica has become part of Europeana, a website that unites a good part of the European funds available on the network. The digital platform on European cultural heritage, developed by the Europeana Foundation - based in The Hague and co-founded by the European Union - in which institutions, researchers, teachers, students and cultural industries of more than 20 nationalities participate and which provides access to more than 50 million items. And this is news, because Catalonia thus has one of the official aggregators that are part of Europeana: it is the only one of a territorial nature that does not correspond to a state.
The official recognition of Catalònica as a Europeana aggregator took place at the last Europeana Aggregators' Forum (EAF) held on November 2 in Budapest. Until the end of 2023, nearly 400,000 digital objects have already been incorporated into the European digital library, which allows the Catalan repositories that are part of Catalònica to increase their use and visibility. This figure will grow progressively, thus highlighting, in a European environment, the cultural, social and scientific memory generated by organizations in Catalonia. Institutions and entities that over the years have made a great commitment to open access.
In short, great news from the Department of Culture that places Catalonia at the same level as the rest of the European countries in terms of making our cultural heritage and our most current reality known.
Through Catalònica we can access a lot of repositories that bring us closer to our cultural heritage. In some cases, they are institutional (generated by universities, administrations, etc.) and in others cooperative. Thus, for example, we can access the scientific, teaching and institutional production of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, discover medieval scrolls from the Library of Catalonia, enjoy the digital repository of the Filmoteca de Catalunya or browse the digital Cartoteca of the Institut Cartogràfic i Geological of Catalonia.
