Opening of digital reproductions of collections for commercial use, an interview with José Luis Bueren Gómez-Acebo, deputy director of the national library of Spain

At the end of April 2020, the National Library of Spain announced that it will allow free commercial use of its digital images. IFLA is delighted to welcome deputy-director of this institution, José Luis Bueren Gómez-Acebo, to tell us more about this new project!

Could you please tell us about your institution and its work with digital collections?

The National Library of Spain (BNE), as many other libraries, has been working with digital collections from the beginning of the 21st century. In 2008 we launched our Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, as a single access point to our digital collections (10.000 titles at that time) and we started several digitization projects. Since then, we have been developing different strategies to promote the use and reuse of these collections. Social media, interactive books, digital exhibitions… In 2017 we made public BNELab to put together some of these initiatives and to develop, around this laboratory, different projects in order to promote reuse. We have published all our metadata in open standards, we have developed a linked open data catalog (datos.bne.es), we have also launched a crowdsourcing platform (Comunidad BNE) a project dedicated to the young students (BNEscolar) and published around one thousand public domain books in epub, free of charge.

To draw the hole picture of our digital collections I should also mention that in these years we have also started to preserve born digital collections. We are already keeping part of the “.es” domain and thousands of digital publications.

The announcement of the decision to open these collections for commercial purposes was very positively received by the OpenGLAM community, could you explain the context of this decision and what are the reasons that led you to develop this project?

As I have just summarized, in the BNE we have been making great efforts to digitize and promote use and reuse of our collections. In the past years we had taken several decisions to facilitate use and reuse of our collections (making easier and cheaper the obtention of images and public use) with very good results in terms of use of our collections. The possibility of allowing commercial use has been under discussion all this time but it is not a minor questions as there are some important issues involved. In the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic we have finally thought that this measure could be a way to help cultural industries to develop new projects or, if not new, to low a barrier to some more “traditional” such as facsimiles editions.

This announcement made, your institution and your teams commit to implementing this policy, what would be the first steps ?

There is a bureaucratic process until the decision is finally official and after that there is not really much work to do (apart from changing watermarks or the information in our website). Indeed, not charging any use simplifies our procedures as we don’t need to process these requests. Beyond this, we would like to deepen the reuse strategy by approaching new users communities. In the medium term we would like to be able to offer directly in our digital library the high resolution images (right now the user needs to request it to the library and, although public use will be free we need to charge a small amount for the image supply). This does not apply to the images available in our digital library: they can be freely downloaded and used.

What would you recommend to small or medium-sized libraries who would also like to get involved in this type of project?

I am very cautious giving advice as each institution has its own context. In general I would encourage them to make a decided commitment with the promotion of use and reuse.

In my view, this vision leads quite naturally to a process of opening licences. But I also think this has to be done not just as a fad but as a serious internal strategy in which not only digital collections but all the activities of the library has to be involved.