The Basque Government has launched the Digital Library of Euskadi, Euskariana, with more than 750,000 references and digital and multimedia objects from the digitized files of different institutions and databases of the Basque Autonomous Community.

The new Euskadi Digital Library, presented this Wednesday by the Minister of Culture and Language Policy, Bingen Zupiria, brings together digital copies of books, manuscripts, incunabula, newspapers, magazines, photographs, graphic and audiovisual material, scores and works of music, among other materials from more than 36 collections and collective catalogs of the main cultural institutions in the Basque Country.

Among them are the digital archives of the Euskadi Public Reading Network Libraries, the Basque Parliament Libraries, the three provincial councils and the three city councils of the Basque capitals, the Azkue Library and Archive, of Euskaltzaindia , and the Basque Music Archive, Eresbil, among others.

The Basque-themed collections of the National Libraries of Spain, France and Germany and the British Library of the United Kingdom are also available, as well as the academic repositories with some digital object of the Universities of the Basque Country and Mondragón and Eusko Ikaskuntza.

The Foral Library of Bizkaia provides, specifically its collection with more than 13,000 printed works from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, its collection of incunabula and manuscripts, with 576 pieces, around 1,000 engravings and plates and 219 maps.

Although it contains collections in Spanish, the Euskadi Digital Library pays special attention to digital, audiovisual and multimedia materials created in Basque or translated into the Basque language.

It is housed on the Internet portal of the Basque Government euskadi.eus and can be consulted by anyone interested in knowing its content through a search engine with different options, which refer the interested party to the portal where the defendant file is digitized.

The process to gather and group on a single Basque Government website all the digitized content of these public and other private institutions and religious entities of the Basque Country, has been carried out “in close and necessary collaboration” between said entities that possess the Basque heritage and cultural funds.

The councilor Zupiria has pointed out that Euskariana, a term used for the first time in the 19th century by the Basque politician and linguist Arturo Campión to group the publication of various of his writings on Basque subjects, aspires to “gather the maximum number of digital resources of realizations with culture Basque “.

For this reason, the references and digital materials contained in it will grow daily with the materials that are published in the digital sphere or with the incorporation of the funds and archives of new public and private institutions.