Dürer, Rubens, Luca Giordano, Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec… When thinking about any of these artists, it is inevitable that their great pictorial legacy comes to mind. But, did you know that many of them also wrote their own books, made illustrations for works of all kinds and had valuable private libraries? The Prado Museum houses an extensive library in its facilities that includes a varied bibliography of these and many other artists: thanks to a long digitization process that has been going on for just over a month, it is also possible to access it from your computer and for free. through the Digital Library of the Prado Museum.
What are we going to find?
The library brings together more than 1,700,000 digitized pages belonging to 5,600 magazines and 6,000 books published between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 20th century. To facilitate its consultation, it is organized into sections such as Printed Books, Manuscripts, Drawing Books, Auction Catalogs, Museum Publications, Magazines and Ephemeral Prado (posters belonging to the Museum's exhibitions). It also has an area called 'Collections' that helps to learn about the bibliographical production on different artistic schools and techniques, as well as that related to the painters and sculptors represented in the Prado Museum. The website offers, in turn, access to various galleries with the digitized bibliography of artists such as Rafael, Velázquez, Murillo, Rubens and Goya, or with other matters of art history.
How to search
As soon as you access the main page of the Prado Museum's Digital Library, a bar appears to perform simple full-text searches. Simply write a word, title, name or concept for the website to retrieve all the results related to the desired term, both the indexed fields and the text content of the digitized documents. But if you need to refine or specify the results more, it also offers the advanced search option in two modalities:
Search by fields
Allows you to select between title, author, editor or printer, place of edition or printing, subject, place, language, year of publication or type of document. In addition, it is possible to limit the search by collections, perform the query only on works that have an associated digital object and specify whether you want to search in any field, in the full text of the works or in the full text of the magazines (newspaper archive in the form).
Custom search
To perform the query through broader categories than those included in the field search and combining several search terms. It also allows you to delimit it by fields, in the full text of all works or only in magazines, and is especially useful if you need to find something in the notes fields and to search by the call number of the original book. Once the search has been carried out, it is possible to view the results in the form of a list or mosaic and order them by different criteria (title, author, publication date, relevance…), or select those that match places, dates, subject descriptors, people and specific institutions. In addition, the image viewer allows you to download and view digital objects in pdf and jpg format, as well as enlarge, reduce, and flip the images.
Other information of interest
Although consultation and navigation are quite simple, the Library includes a user guide to learn more about how it works and a frequently asked questions section to answer the most common questions. For example, it explains that to access the content you do not need to register, but anyone who wishes can create an account through the 'Log in' function displayed at the top right of the main page. Thus, a space will be created in which to save searches, create lists of favorite works, include bibliographies related to a topic of interest… This section also refers to use licenses: most of the publications that are part of the Digital library are reproductions of works in the public domain and are offered under the Creative Commons Attribution CC By 4.0 International license. This means that it allows the use, transformation, reproduction and redistribution of the digital work, even for commercial purposes, as long as the source of origin is mentioned. Even so, some works are protected by copyright, and depending on the use you want to make of them, it is necessary to obtain permission from the owner or owners of the rights.