How to get more than 4 thousand digitized books from RAE

Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) opens the doors of his digital library providing readers and researchers with a documentary collection of more than 4,800 digitized works owned by the RAE, distributed in 5,250 volumes.

Access via www.rae.es/biblioteca-digital will allow you to experience first-hand the works of authors such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Rosalia de Castro or Ruben Dario.

Thanks to the digital library, any Internet user can view thousands of works, dwelling in detail and assessing the features of each specimen. His viewfinderwhich allows, among other things, the use of different display options, including “book mode”– also has a system optical character recognition (optical character recognitiontranslated from English), which means that certain words and letters can be found in the digitized texts.

For this digitization, a selection has been made that gives priority to those titles that are particularly important because of their special characteristics: unique or very rare in libraries around the world, or of great historical, historical or editorial value. These are works similar to the first edition of the first part Don Quixote1605, or one of the handwritten copies Buscon Francisco de Quevedo.

Digitization works of interest for regular users of the RAE library, specialists in the Spanish language, literature and bibliography, such as orthographies, treatises on syntax, primers, history of the Spanish language, etc.

Most people work the same way. outstanding spanish writers of the centuries xv To XIXas well as the major Latin classics and foreign authors represented in this library.

Currently about 1,500,000 pages. In addition, it is planned to gradually include in it those works that are digitized at the request of researchers, as well as those that the Academy considers especially relevant.

The electronic library is accessible to everyone

The RAE Digital Library is one of the most ambitious projects that the Academy has worked on at the digital level. All digitized works can now be consulted without restrictions and with free access thanks to the search engine included in the web section (www.rae.es/biblioteca-digital), integrated into the institutional page rae.es, with a simple interface for both the general public and researchers. The digital library has an attractive and functional design and has accessible navigation, allowing users themselves, whether they are specialists or not, to choose how they want to see and read works. The viewer is invited “book mode”, in which the reader will be able to turn pages as if it were a paper copy, but will also have the option of seeing everything on individual pages (which is how the material was digitized) or in a grid (to have the entire map or do a quick search). After the on-screen consultation, you can also download the full work in PDF format.

This new section of the website and its search engine have been designed to provide optimal visualization and search with the required speed and accuracy. Additionally, if information is not available for search engine use, they are included. various categories to delve into a topic, type of material, language, year of publication or heritage. Using the function to scale viewerthe user can examine each of the pages in detail, accurately perceiving all the elements of the original: from the ink of the print to the weave of the paper.

There is an additional feature added to the RAE Digital Library that makes this viewer an even more complete tool than the usual ones. It’s about OCR (optical character recognition, translated from English), which will make it easier, as far as the age of the texts allow, to search for words and letters in digitized documents. This represents an achievement that allows one not only to search and find works, but also to search and find what one wants within the works themselves.