Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano: open source technology in the service of a major cooperative project

Abstract

The Digital Library of Ibero-American Heritage was presented at the National Library of Spain in September 2012. This new portal provides access to the digital collections of the Ibero-American National Libraries grouped in ABINIA. It currently provides access to the collections of six National Libraries: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Portugal and Spain. In the near future new partners are expected to incorporate to the project.

The development, after some time of study, has been done under open standards, such as XML, Dublin Core or MARC. The technology of the search engine is the open source Lucene/SOLR and the platform is based on Java and HTML.

The portal is already the biggest repository to search Latin-American content and, over time, it could turn into a complementary tool to the most important projects in digital cultural content: Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America.

This paper outlines the history of the Project in the context of a growing Ibero-American focus on digital projects and access to cultural heritage, the current situation, the technological architecture and the impact within end users.