Fondo antiguo y repositorios universitarios en España

This paper uses an analysis of the repositories of Spanish universities to identify which institutions contain rare book and manuscript collections. The method used in this analysis involved examining each university on the basis of a list comprising eleven elements. A total of 60 universities were found to have repositories but only 28 (16.8 %) of these contained rare book and manuscript collections. In the light of these figures, which suggest that Spanish university repositories do not generally consider the preservation of rare books and manuscripts to be part of their institutional mission, the paper reflects upon why some Spanish university repositories do contain such collections.

La gestión de las colecciones de fondo antiguo en las bibliotecas universitarias españolas: análisis de los textos normativos

Objective: to locate and study texts governing the management of the ancient collections housed in Spain’s university libraries so as to trace the qualities that characterize these collections from a management perspective.

Methodology: documents were collected and their content analysed, a cross comparison was undertaken between some of the texts and with the resulting data an overall study was made to summarize the state of the art.

Results: a total of 33 texts with information related to the management of ancient university collections were identified and analysed which enabled us to determine the current status of the regulation of access, consultation, technical processing, deposit, reproduction and loaning for exhibitions of the collections of ancient books in Spain’s university libraries.