Fundación Telefónica

• Fundación Telefónica
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Digitizations

Fundación Telefónica leads a unique program for the digitization of internet content. Its goal is to enhance the presence of the Spanish language and its culture throughout this worldwide network. Thanks to this program, accessing texts and the most important holdings of leading libraries and museums via the internet is now a reality.

One of the more ambitious jobs undertaken by the Art & Technology program in 2008 was the digitization of the valuable collection of documents in the Joan Miró Foundation: 13,000 documents - 8,000 drawings, sketches and notes and 5,000 items relating to illustrations of collector-quality books, dated between 1901 and 1983. Joan Miró donated this collection to the Telefónica himself in 1976.
Thanks to the agreement between the two foundations, the project was done with state-of-the-art scanner provided by Telefónica Solutions, specially designed for manuscripts and documents that cannot be exposed to light or to abrupt changes of temperature. Aside from   guaranteeing the safe preservation of the works, this system makes it much easier for researchers to consult them, for in the future they will be accessible from the museum’s library without relying on any physical files.  

In 2008, Fundación Telefónica and the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC) (a center housing Catalonian art from its Roman era until as recently as the 1940s) have renewed their 2005 collaboration agreement to digitize its art library, thought to be the oldest in Spain.
Collections of magazines more than eighty years old, special editions of art books and even a collection of more than 2,000 drawings by Fortuny are just some of the valuable documents object of this digitization process. The museum library's catalogue contains approximately 150,000 entries, including books, magazine articles, titles of magazines and archive collection.

In 2008, Fundación Telefónica also renewed its collaboration agreement with El Palau de Música Catalana [Palace of Catalan Music] initiated six years ago. It is a question of digitizing approximately 22,000 cards, nearly 12,000 monographs and 9,000 pieces of choral sheet music, which make up the collection of the Orfeó Catalá Library, a private library specializing in music and the Modernist period.
Thanks to Fundación Telefónica, musical notebooks, opera librettos, letters, etc., dating from the 12th century (including original manuscripts of authors like Satie, Granados and Albéniz), were made accessible to the general public. To do this, Telefónica Solutions used the most modern methods available, line-by-line scanning technology, to protect each one of these works carefully. In recognition of this effort, El Palau de la Música Catalana awarded Fundación Telefónica its Centenary Gold Medal, in 2008.  

In 2007 and 2008, Fundación Telefónica began the process of cataloguing and digitizing the main archives of the Espigas Foundation’s Photo Library. This is a non-profit institution created to preserve and publicize a variety of documents on the history of plastic arts in Argentina, Argentinean art worldwide and international art insofar as it relates to the country.

This documentation center contains an important collection of 28,000 photographs, slides, transparencies and negatives, including reproductions, artist portraits, photos of exhibits and institutions and social and biographical material. As well as digitizing it, the Fundación Telefónica has put the database on the Internet for full public access.