Ligue des Bibliothèques Europeènnes de Recherche, Groupe des Cartothécaires de LIBER


National progress report of Spain 1986-1988

  1. Establishing a Map Curatorship Working Group
    We can trace the origins of this group going back to 1985, when a commission first met to prepare the American Ancient Maps in the Spanish Union Catalogue, in order to commemorate the Fifth Centenary of the discovery of America. Unfortunately. this project was never completed.
    The following government collections are represented in our group:

    Our group aims at:

    At present we are trying to formally constitute an Association, and we have therefore asked foreign groups for information and help.

    We are also working at the translation of Cartographic materials: a manual of interpretation for AACR2, with the permission of the ALA. In addition we are preparing a tThesaurus.

  2. Standardization progress
    The Spanish Nationnl Library has prepared the cataloguing rules for cartographic materials. according to the international rules, which will soon be published by the Ministry of Culture.

    The Spanish National Geographic Institute has also recently published its enlarged and revised second edition of the MARC(CM) manual.

  3. The control of cartographic publications
    Due to a Legal Deposit Act, all cartographic materials printed in Spain enter the National Library .This is the basis for the Spanish National Bibliography. This guarantee has been reinforced by a Cartography Planning Act (January 1986), which establishes a Central Register of Cartography that will record every official cartographic publication, including unpublished or undistributed documents.

  4. Progress in automation
    The National Geographic Institute Map Library is now highly automated. The National Library Map Section is preparing its automation. At this point, only the cataloguing of monographs is fully automated in our National Library.

  5. New map collection
    Spanish Regionaul Governments and universities are proving increasingly interest in establishing map collections. Thus we can point out the new map library at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid), which has centralized collections from different faculty libraries, or the Andalusian Regional Government Map Library (Cartoteca de la Comunidad Autonoma de Andalucia)

  6. Publications

    I would also like to mention the publication of many catalogues from exhibitions devoted to the cartography of various Spanish regions. organized by the National Geographical Institute and regional governments.

Teresa Reyna, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid


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